Mike McCue, the cofounder of TellMe, announced today that he is leaving Microsoft's speech-recognition subsidiary.

Zig Serafin, a general manager for Microsoft's speech components group, will be taking McCue's job and bringing together TellMe's 330 employees in Mountain View, Calif., together with another 80 people in Microsoft working on speech technology in Redmond and in Beijing, China.

Microsoft bought TellMe in 2007, which provides the voice-recognition technology behind many customer-service phone systems. TellMe handles 40 percent of all 411 calls in the U.S., the company says. They also developed a voice-recognition service for Windows Mobile that we wrote about here.

McCue, then chief executive, became general manager of the business. Before starting TellMe in 1999, he started a company that he sold to browser maker Netscape. Here's a story we ran on McCue last year. He plans to stick around until June 30, take a month or two off, then return to the startup world.

(Top photo of Mike McCue credit: Paul Sakuma/The Associated Press; bottom photo of Zig Serafin credit: Microsoft.)