Holy smokes. This is one iPhone app I’ve definitely been wanting – Voice Dial for iPhone.
Voice Dial is published by Makayama, the company that recently brought out the Camera Pro program.
I’ve been trying out Voice Dial for a little while, and it mostly works great, and works for lots more than just dialing phone numbers too!
I’ve only had a short time with the app, so this may not be a complete list – but so far I’ve seen that it can be used for:
- Dialing Contacts
- Launching any app you have installed on the iPhone
- Launching bookmarked web sites
I’ve tried all of these out and they work very well. Adding the ability to launch favorite sites is a super cool feature, and one I don’t recall seeing on other voice command sort of applications. It’s also quite nice that the app shows you a list of all your existing apps / contacts / bookmarks when you choose to enter a new command in any of those categories – so it’s easy to flick and scroll to the one you want.
Voice Dial is quick and easy to get going with. The first setup thing you need to do is just record its 3 system commands – Accept, Cancel, a nd Repeat – which are used to interact with al
l the other commands. Once you’ve done those, you can fire away and start creating commands for any of your contacts, applications, or favorite web sites.
So far, Voice Dial has done very well at recognizing each command correctly when I created them and when I used them – one mistake so far and that’s with me sitting near a TV and talking very quietly. It does not come with any pre-built commands, so you need to enter your own for any commands you want to have available to use.
Preferences settings for the app include the ability to assign to the Home button double-click action, and to choose whether not you want confirmations each time you speak a command.
The program has a very good online manual and FAQ – which is nice to see, especially as it is a paid-for program. The manual provides a nice little "Getting Started’ sort of Guide for the app too. The full app costs $27.95, but you install it as a ‘tryout’ via Installer – I’m not sure as yet how long (or limited) the trial is.
One little annoyances with Voice Dial – it prompts you to Buy or Continue when you launch it. As a voice command app, that creates a nasty little delay when executing a command- this prompt should be placed somewhere else within the app, or be set to only appear on every X number of uses I think.
Makayama’s product page for Voice Dial states that the app Will be ported to the official Apple SDK when available. That’s good to hear, and hopefully this will be achieved quite quickly.
This one is well worth checking out, and it’s on Installer now.
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