Just when you thought it was safe to buy a nav app for the iPhone, Google goes and announces a free app for Android, and says it's going to be available for the iPhone if Apple will let it into the App Store.

The app, called Google Maps Navigation, will ship with phones running the Android OS 2.0 and includes search by voice, search for points of interest by voice while in route, satellite and street view, and support for a hardware dock for 'certain devices.'

This won't be great news for TomTom, Navigon, or any of the rest. Google says the app is U.S. only for now, and will be seen first on the Verizon Droid which will appear in November.

Talk about disruption! With the FCC watching it will be most interesting to see if Apple allows the app onto the iPhone and, whether yes or no, the effect on Android sales.

I can't wait for all the fur to fly. You can watch a video of the app in action in this YouTube clip. Admit it. You want this!

MacSpeech Dictate has now been upgraded to version 1.5, giving the application more accuracy and a new vocabulary editor. The update also includes a new English profile option, allowing you to indicate if your speech has North American, Southern North American, or a Latino North American accent.

The software also includes the addition of the top 100 websites to the "Jump to" command option.

This is the first update of MacSpeech Dictate since last February.

As I did in my last post on this software, I dictated this article completely by voice. It appears that the software is more accurate in recognizing my speech. Although I upgraded from an earlier version, the software did require me to retrain, which involves reading a short story that takes about five minutes. In my dictation for this post the software missed the word 'and' once and typed 'hand'. I used the 'scratch that' command, re-tried the word, and it worked well.

As I dictated some other documents using both Microsoft Word and Pages from Apple, I was impressed at the large vocabulary of the program. It even recognized the word O-ring, which is pretty technical, and could have been easily misinterpreted.

If you're already an owner of MacSpeech Dictate, it's probably worth update for the new features. If you haven't tried dictating into your Macintosh, and have a need to do so, the program is worth a try. The developer has licensed the Dragon recognition engine from Nuance Communications, which is the premier voice recognition software on the PC. This newest version of MacSpeech is available for US $199, or as a US $54.95 for current owners of the application. To run it, you'll need to be on Leopard version 10.5.6 or above.

In product shootouts between the iPhone and other smartphones, the iPhone usually gets dinged for not having voice dialing built in (although you can get around that with services like Jott). Vocalia, from Creaceed, is a voice-recognition dialing app that has been around for about six months.

Vocalia (click opens iTunes) displays a HAL9000-like glowing "eye" after being launched. When the eye appears, speak the name of a contact you wish to call. Vocalia analyzes your speech, then displays the closest matches to what you said. If there's more than one contact listed, you then speak the number next to the correct one. Are there multiple phone numbers for a contact? Just say "home", "mobile", "work" or whatever to dial.

Creaceed and TUAW would like to give away seven free promo codes for Vocalia.What do you need to do to enter? Just leave a comment on who you'd like to dial using Vocalia. Good luck, and we look forward to seeing your creative answers!

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. (Sorry, we know our international readers want to participate, but promo codes don't transfer outside the US.)
  
• To enter leave a comment telling us what person you'd like to call using Vocalia.
  
• The comment must be left before February 28, 11:59PM Eastern Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Seven winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prize: Promo code for free copy of Vocalia for iPhone (US$3.99)
  
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

MacSpeech Inc. unveiled a new update to its well regarded speech recognition application for the Mac today. The release of version 1.3, available immediately by download, has some significant enhancements and fixes. To test this new release, I've dictated this review into our browser-based content management system without much trouble. I had to correct a couple of uncommon words, but that is easily done in the spelling mode.

One of the interesting features of the new version is a 'cache document' command that will allow MacSpeech to read a document's contents in order to navigate that document, and to enter and edit text. This improves MacSpeech Dictate's ability to work with any document, including documents not created with the program itself. MacSpeech has also greatly improved the help system and added several visual enhancements that will allow users to see the status of the program and the mode it's operating in.

The new 'press the key' command will input a specific keyboard key. This allows using modifier keys, such as Control, Option, and Command. MacSpeech Dictate has always had a strong speech recognition engine, but was sometimes weak in the software that surrounded it. Early on, the company distributed some bad install disks, but that was quickly remedied.

MacSpeech Dictate requires an Intel-based Macintosh computer with a minimum of OS X 10.4 .11 or 10.5 .2 or higher. Here is a link to more details of the update.

MacSpeech Dictate had its last update in November of 2008, when version 1.2.1 was released. Existing users of the program will be prompted to do the update the next time MacSpeech launches. In my case, the update worked well, and without incident.

MacSpeech Dictate is US $199.00 direct from the developer or at retail including the Apple online and brick and mortar stores.

According to the New York Times and the Google iPhone page, the big G is about to add voice recognition capabilities to its iPhone search app (iTunes link), with the new version showing up on the App Store any minute now. You'll be able to ask questions (the kind Google can answer, of course; someone else will have to tell you if those pants make you look fat) and get speedy search results returned from the web or your own address book.

[As of Saturday afternoon 3:30pm ET, the new version is still not in the App Store; interestingly, the Google page no longer has the video embed of the voice recognition demo, nor does it show the new feature listing. Perhaps there was a last-minute delay?

Update, Sunday AM: Techcrunch is reporting an anticipated Monday release for the new version. No details given on the reason for the delay. -Ed.]

Update, Monday PM: The app isn't listed as updated in the App Store, but removing the old Google Mobile app from the phone and reinstalling it brings it back with the voice search capability. Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

The voice recordings from the application will be sent to Google's servers for processing "in the cloud." Given the size of Google's infrastructure and its ability to transfer gargantuan amounts of data, it may have the advantage over existing voice-driven search apps such as Yahoo's oneSearch. Google execs seem hesitant to quantify the accuracy of the voice recognition software, but here's hoping it at least tops some of the iPhone voice-dialers I've been playing with.

You can see a sample video of Googlers testing the feature in the continuation of this post.

[via Truemors / blogtopten]

I want my iPhone to have voice dialing. Belgian developers Creaceed are moving in the right direction by introducing the Vocalia English speech recognition tool for iPhone. This app just does one thing right now -- displaying contacts from your Address Book when you say names. You still need to tap on the name that appears to open the contact, then tap on a number to dial it. Creaceed is working on adding new functionality to future versions.

How well does Vocalia recognize names? I tested it by reading the first 100 names in Contacts. Without training Vocalia, it was able to correctly recognize 98 of the names -- that is, it put them on a screen with three of the closest sounding names. For 83 of the names, the correct name was at the top of the list. The two names that weren't recognized properly were Guilherme and Guiseppe. You can also add nicknames or other pronunciations to any name to further improve accuracy.

Between now and October 18th, Vocalia is on sale for US$3.99 in the App Store (click opens iTunes). The regular price of Vocalia is $7.99.

David Pogue, the NY Times' answer to Walt Mossberg (as distinct from "This WSJ writer, nicknamed Uncle Walt, hosted two technology legends at a 2007 conference" -- that's the Jeopardy answer to Walt Mossberg) hasn't reviewed Parallels 3.0 yet, at least not in print. On his blog, however, Pogue has given the new version an enthusiastic thumbs up.

Pogue uses Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Windows to do a large chunk of his writing (Mac voice-rec tools like TrueVoice or iListen, though available, did not measure up to his needs) which has meant either lugging two laptops around or, more recently, Boot Camp. Up until now the USB audio support in Parallels hasn't worked well enough for speech recognition to go smoothly. With the 3.0 release and an XP virtual machine (Vista was still too resource-intensive), Pogue is now running the voice-rec app completely flawlessly and happily.

Pogue's post ends with a reminder of how the platform equation is changing; he writes, "Whether you're a Mac person or a Windows person, the point is that you can now run 100 percent of the world's computer software on a single machine, faster and more easily than ever." It's no longer a matter of justifying answers to "Why would you buy a Mac?" but simply responding "Why wouldn't you buy a computer that can run all your applications, whichever platform you need?"