Filed under: iPhone, App Review
Vlingo adds voice control to older iPhones
Pity the poor iPhone 3G owner who now has to grapple with reality; yes, what was until Friday the world's coolest smartphone is now simply a piece of yesterday's tech, as current as a punchcard and as enduring as a wax cylinder recording on a hot afternoon. No, not really -- the iPhone 3G is just as cool as it was a week ago, and for $99 it's a relative bargain. Still, there's some envy on the wind.
Some of our readers have apparently been so dazzled by Apple's enthusiastic promotion of the new iPhone 3G S that they were fooled into believing that the hardware-linked features of the 3G S (the compass and the voice controls, specifically) would be made available on the 3G with the delivery of the 3.0 software update. They have written to us, irate and frustrated, wanting to know what happened to their promised features. We sympathize, and we want to help.
There is, as it happens, a way to get one of the marquee features of the 3G S -- voice control -- onto your iPhone 3G or original iPhone. The vlingo app, available free in the App Store since December of last year and also available for Blackberry & Windows Mobile, gives you voice command dialing from your address book, map search, Yahoo web searches, Twitter/Facebook updating, and more. The recognition quality is quite good; it's worked as well as Google Voice Search for me in most cases.
Vlingo is quite a bit slower to recognize audio on the 3G than the built-in Voice Control is on the 3G S (unsurprisingly, considering the horsepower boost on the new phone); it also does not allow iTunes control, while Apple's tool does. Despite these drawbacks, it's fun to use and very slick. Update: As Eitan points out in the comments, vlingo's speed is not necessarily limited by the local processing power, since it depends on the remote server for audio analysis.
One of the major points of contention regarding vlingo, and a cause of many negative reviews on the App Store, is that the app does have to do something a little bit touchy in order to enable voice dialing: it asks if it can upload your contact names to vlingo. While this is a necessary step if you want to use voice dialing, and while the company says it does not include phone numbers with that upload nor does it use the information for any purpose other than creating spoken profiles to recognize the names of your contacts when you speak them, there are plenty of users who aren't comfortable with this step. If you're not OK with it, you can still use vlingo without the voice dialing feature; at that point, however, it's not dramatically better than Google's Voice Search.
You can watch a video demo of vlingo in the 2nd half of this post. If you've got other workarounds or third-party apps that help 3G owners level up with their happy 3G S comrades, please let us know.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Daniel said 7:18PM on 6-20-2009
I'm quite surprised - it even understood my (New Zealand) accent! Usually voice recognition tech has no idea what we're saying.
Well, that being said, the contact calling recognition isn't great, but the facebook update thing does really well.
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tuaw.20.eitan said 8:01PM on 6-20-2009
"Vlingo is quite a bit slower to recognize audio on the 3G than the built-in Voice Control is on the 3G S (unsurprisingly, considering the horsepower boost on the new phone)"
This statement is a bit misleading. Vlingo is slower because it has to upload the audio to a sever to do the speech processing. I bet Vlingo runs almost as poorly on the 3GS (despite the "horsepower boost").
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Steve Marks said 7:34PM on 6-20-2009
Looks like the company has updated their privacy policy (in May 2009) and is now far more desirable than before. They seem to have addressed the main concerns of the 1- and 2-star reviewers in the App Store.
Before: "We have the authority to share your contact names with our contractors and subcontractors..."
Now: "We collect names of individuals and companies that appear in your address book in order to analyze them so we can provide a high quality service when you speak a contact name. We do not collect any other information associated with these names such as addresses or phone numbers. We will never use these names to contact anyone for any reason, and we have no way of associating these names with unique individuals or of linking them back to you. We will not sell or otherwise use this information to sell services to anyone."
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Dave said 8:48PM on 6-20-2009
That's really a semantic difference. I wouldn't be surprised if their internal action/policy/process is unchanged and they simply re-worded the privacy statement so it's nicer to read from a PR perspective.
Gina said 7:35PM on 6-20-2009
I just installed the app on my phone. So far, I love it, gives me another reason not to update my iphone from a 3G to a 3G S.
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DrDiesel said 7:48PM on 6-20-2009
I just wish that like the Blackberry version, Vlingo for the iPhone would also work for text messaging. That was the original reason I got it a few months ago but I have yet to realyl even use the app much because of that lacking feature.
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Cronick said 8:23PM on 6-20-2009
I have been quite happy with Melodis Voice Dialer for quite some time now (free):
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=298537721&mt=8
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rdsh said 11:01PM on 6-20-2009
I also use Melodis and it works a treat.
joe said 10:02PM on 6-20-2009
$99 is not a bargain ;)
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eyezberg said 12:47AM on 6-21-2009
Other workarounds:
step 1: jailbreak and install Cydia.
step 2: video recording (can be uploaded to YouTube or emailed just the same from the phone): iPhone video recorder: http://www.iphonevideorecorder.com/ Works great, even if the FPS on the 3G are a bit limited.. No editing.
step 3: uh, is there anything else missing anyone would need/use? compass? not really..
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lucas said 1:36AM on 6-21-2009
is this free app?
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Dr. Spaceman said 3:34AM on 6-21-2009
Well, it does say "free in the app store." If you wanted more confirmation, you could have clicked where it said that, because it was a link to the app in the AppStore.
But who reads, anyway. Amirite?
JamesAven said 5:04AM on 6-21-2009
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dallasward007 said 10:38AM on 6-21-2009
If Vlingo works on earlier iPhones why couldn't Apple put their voice control on early iPhones? Same goes for MMS and stereo Bluetooth. Seems like they are hobbling old ones. It doesn't make me want to upgrade from my original iPhone to a 3G S knowing that upgrades are less based on hardware capability than planned obsolesence.
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David V. said 12:50PM on 6-21-2009
I wonder if the answer has to do with the user interface of Apple's "Voice Control": I don't have to "wake" the iPhone (3G[S]) or be in any specific app to make use of it. I just hold the main button on the included headset and speak the command when the sound signal rings.
UI is the weak spot of Vlingo: I really don't want to have to pay attention to the phone's screen to "voice dial" when I'm driving.
huth.sebastian said 2:14PM on 6-21-2009
Gonna take another week, 2 at the most and it'll be available in Cydia, it has nothing to do with hardware, so it can be brought to other iPhones, I assume.
Other than video and compass. MMS for 2G… maybe. I'm excited to see what is possible.
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Iphone videos said 9:21PM on 9-13-2009
Is this available in market?
Iphone videos
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