Speed dial apps – voice dialers or photo dialers – seem like they are high on just about everybody’s iPhone apps wish list. I certainly always look to find one (or even one of each type) that works well for me.
So I was keen to give SpeechCloud Voice Dialer a try, as it the very first voice dialing application that made it to the iPhone App Store. I’ll keep this post short and not too sweet, because I’ve only given the program a quick look and find it pretty much unusable in its first version. Others may well have better luck, but you can read on for my findings and reasons for not continuing with it …
SpeechCloud Voice Dialer has a pleasant enough look and feel to it – very basic, but simple to use and one easy, large button to start issuing voice commands. It offers short, clear instructions on how to use it on the same main screen where the voice command button is.
In fact, that is the app’s only screen – there is not even a settings or preferences page of any kind. Another way in which the program keeps things simple is that it requires no training. You do not need to spend any time practicing or teaching it any commonly used words or similar. Right from the off, you just press and hold the large command button and say ‘Call contact name’ and away you go – in theory. 🙁
So the app is pretty bare bones in terms of appearance and features – but that seems fine, as I really only want it to do one thing for me.
And that’s where the problem comes in. The one thing that SpeechCloud needs to do – recognize a contact name when spoken and call it – it has so far utterly failed to do more than 90% of the time!
I’ve tried the app out on four separate occasions today – all of them done in a quiet room with no music or TV playing anywhere in the house at the time. Each time I tried issuing commands to call 5-6 different contacts, with very different names each time, trying to cover names starting with all sorts of different letters, short names, longer ones, even a couple of client company names that are only letters (e.g. ‘Call KGI’).
I tried each contact 3 times. So in total I’ve given the app around 60-70 commands total across a range of (pretty easy) names thus far. Number of times it recognized the correct contact so a call could’ve been placed = 2.
Yup, two. Again, this was in a very quiet environment, and I tried placing the iPhone and its mic at varying distances away from my face, from very, very close to arm’s length etc. I tried speaking very slowly and less slowly, concentrated on speaking clearly, raised my voice to almost a shout. Nothing helped. Recognition was shockingly bad, useless.
Again, others’ mileage may vary of course – and I’d love to hear from any
of you who have tried the app, regardless of what sort of results you’re getting. But for me, SpeechCloud is a non-starter. If the results are this dismal in a quiet room when I’m pampering it in every way possible, what chance has it got in the ‘real world’ trying to make a call in a hurried voice in a noisy car, for example.
The apps’s web page mentions that it is in beta and recognition is still being worked on:
speechcloud’s Voice Dialer is in final beta, meaning the high-speed speech recognition servers it uses are still being tuned for accuracy on the iPhone. Also, the Voice Dialer works best on wifi and 3G networks. Performance over the AT&T Edge network (used by iPhone 1.0) varies widely.
All my tests were done over a strong WiFi connection – so I would suggest that (unless my results are a complete anomaly) there is a LONG way to to go in making the performance acceptable.
SpeechCloud is a free app (for now), though the web site indicates that this is only for the ‘beta period’. I certainly would not be very happy right now if I’d paid anything for this app, so I hope they will make great strides on improving performance in future updates. I’ll even keep the program installed, so that I can see whether they get this right.
For now though, I won’t be having any more strained conversations with it …
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