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Vlingo, an app from Vlingo Corporation, is available for free (US$10 for full upgrade) at the App Store.
When Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) enabled in-app purchases for iPhone applications, it seemed as though the days of "free" and "paid" versions of any given app were coming to an end. Soon, I thought, everything in the store would start out free as a teaser and then charge for an upgrade.
That hasn't exactly panned out universally, but Vlingo's new voice application does charge in the way I thought all apps would charge by now. You can download it for free, but getting to the premium features costs $10.
Vlingo is a speech-to-text app that can use that text in any of six general ways, depending on what you order it to do. You can speak that order before speaking the actual text you want to use with it (SMS Nancy ... just landed in Tucson). Or you can hit a button that takes you to the six functions Vlingo covers, select one, and just start talking. People who use voice apps a lot will be familiar with the way you must pronounce punctuation ("email Fred ... subject your car ... body I wrecked it period still friends question mark").
The free version can be told to dial a contact, search Maps, update a social network (Facebook or Twitter), and perform a Web search (Google, Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Bing all worked for me). For an upgrade, you can also compose emails (To, Subject and Body fields are filled out by your dictation, and it's sent by the app directly) as well as SMS messages, though with those you'll have to paste the text of the message into the actual SMS app yourself. The upgrade costs US$10 for both, or $7 for an individual function.
Power Dialer, Strange Maps
Vlingo works best as a phone dialer. It's really quite simple: Say "call [someone's name]," and it calls it after giving you a few seconds to correct it if it misunderstood you. If you have multiple numbers for the person, add the word "work" or "cell" or "home" after the name.
The usability of the mapping feature seems to depend a lot on what you're looking for. I wanted to know all the locations of Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles. After speaking "find Roscoe's Waffles" into the mic, Vlingo asked me to verify what I'd said in text, then kicked me over to the Map app, which showed me a handful of locations all around the Los Angeles area. Perfect.
But what about if I just wanted to find the nearest gas station? I told Vlingo, "find gas station," but instead of stations in my immediate vicinity, I got a dozen or so in various European nations. "Find gas station near my location" put me in Malaysia. Simply "find gas" gave me a worldwide map and dropped pins in a few U.S. states and Western Europe. Only when I specifically named the city I wanted it to look in did it give me local gas stations. Fair enough, but the iPhone does have the ability to know its location, and I wonder why that feature wasn't better integrated into the way Vlingo finds things on a map for you.
Facing Off With the Dragon
But if Vlingo's strength is its ability to tell what you want to do with the text you're about to dictate -- email it to Jim, SMS it to Jane, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) it, tweet it, or whatever -- then its weakness lies in figuring out what that text actually is. Dictating a message that amounts to more than eight or so words might require some revision, and not just for punctuation Nazis or people who use lots of large and uncommon words. Vlingo seemed to get a lot of words just plain wrong fairly often compared to another voice recognition app I've been using for a few months, Dragon Dictation.
For example, here's a paragraph of text from a podcast I wrote a few weeks ago:
An inquisition at the hands of European commissioners sounds like a pretty scary ordeal, like it might well involve several implements of torture, all of them rusty. For Google, though, it may be more of a coming of age story: What kind of technology giant can you be, really, unless you've been investigated by the EC antitrust officials?
I went to the transcript of that podcast and re-read that paragraph into a recorder twice: once with an extremely slow and robotic tone, once with a slightly more natural patter. Then I played back both versions into both Vlingo and Dictation. Vlingo's version of the robo-toned recording reads like this:
In a position at the hands of European commissioners sounds like a pretty scary work yeah, like it might well involves several and message to Archer, all of them rusty. For google, so, it may have Jorge coming of age story what kind of technology giant can you be, really, and message been investigated body EC anti trust official ... [cut off; there seems to be a 30-second time limit].
The more naturally spoken version was an even uglier mishmash of wrong words and various names from my contacts list.
Dragon, on the other hand, mastered even the natural version almost flawlessly:
An inquisition at the hands of European commissioners sounds like a pretty scary ordeal, like it might well involve several implements of torture, all of them rusty. For Google, though, it may be more of a coming-of-age story-what kind of technology giant can you beat, really, unless you've been investigated by the EC antitrust officials?
However, Vlingo does beat Dragon in terms of the tools it gives you to correct its errors. Once the message is completed and turned into text, you can edit it using not only a keypad, but also an additional recorder that will insert a new spoken word. Tap on any word in the message, and Vlingo will give you a set of likely alternates you can sub in with one touch -- though the correct word isn't always among them.
Bottom Line
Vlingo's fine when you're using the app to dial a number or Google a word. Things get a little hairier with a social network post unless it's just a few words long, and I've mentioned the hit-and-miss experience with the mapping feature.
But Vlingo just isn't as accurate in speech interpretation as Dragon Dictation, and that makes the features for which you must pay -- email and SMS -- a bit less compelling. True, Dictation is basically a simple speech-to-text machine. It won't address your emails through speech or dump in subject lines for you, it's entirely impractical for maps and search engine queries, and it can't dial the phone at all. In SMS slickness, it's a draw -- both make you go outside the app and paste in the text.
However, when you're talking about SMS and especially email, then the body of the message is probably the part that's going to take the longest to correct. Fewer errors means less time making corrections. Perhaps it's all very dependent on the way each individual speaks, but for me, Dictation simply makes fewer mistakes.
Compare for yourself -- Dictation's free, and Vlingo's free without the SMS and email options activated. Try making a few tweets or Facebook posts in Vlingo and see how well it understands you. Then compare to Dictation. If Vlingo manages to understand you better than it understands my banter, the upgrade might be worth it for you. It just wasn't for me.
