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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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...
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Is this available in market?
Iphone videos
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.
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.
June 21 2009 at 10:38 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI 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.
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James
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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?
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..
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
I also use Melodis and it works a treat.
June 20 2009 at 10:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI 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.
June 20 2009 at 7:48 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI 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.
June 20 2009 at 7:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHot Apps on TUAW
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