[app review] vlingo comes to iPhone

by Justin Horn on Dec 4th, 2008 @ 12:36 am

I hadn’t heard of this app until today as this has only been a Blackberry toy up until now. Following Gruber on Twitter I saw he was playing with  vlingo [iTunes link] earlier today and he seems like a pretty cool guy so I thought I would give it a try. I have to say I already find this more useful than the new google mobile app. The voice recognition quality seems on par with google and I think google is probably the best out there in this field. The new google mobile app does have the cool lift the phone to your face and speak trick (look ma, no hands), but as Gruber pointed out a few weeks ago they used undocumented APIs…so you can’t blame vlingo for not bending the rules on their first version. I have a feeling in a future update they might do something similar to what google is doing. Also, the google mobile app doesn’t yet support my favorite feature of vlingo and I would take this feature over the hands free any day.

My favorite feature vlingo brings to the table is voice dialing. This is something I liked on my old phones (when it worked) that the iPhone didn’t have and now a 3rd party app has come to the rescue. I tried using this to call about 6 contacts so far and it’s worked every time! It has worked so well in fact that I’ve kicked the default ‘Phone app’ out of the dock and moved vlingo into it’s place. With over 200 contacts this is just easier than flipping through list. Vlingo also does web search, map search, and social networks (only facebook & twitter as of this version). I have a feeling this app will grow in the future and get even better, but it’s already worth downloading now if you haven’t already and best of all it’s FREE!

Here’s how voice dialing works…

Step 1 Go to the phone submenu
Step 2 Click the “Press + Speak” (either hold-speak-release or tap-speak-tap) and say “Dark Knight mobile”
Step 3 Ok, there really isn’t a step three…you just wait for it to auto dial or press dial

In the example above I was doing this from the ‘Phone’ submenu, but the real beauty of this app is you can do all the searches from the home screen.


vlingo home screen

Working again with the example above, but this time form the vlingo home screen…you ‘Press + Speak’ and say “Call Dark Knight mobile”. The only difference from before is you say ‘call’ before the contact name to let vingo know what you are up to.

This works for all the searches vlingo can do.  For maps you say ‘Find, movie theaters in maimi florida’. Want to update your twitter status you say ‘Twitter, hey look at me I’m tweeting with my voice’. Your default web search is set to google, but you feel like checking out yahoo results you simply say ‘Yahoo, vlingo reviews’.

All these home searches are cool, but for me the ability to do a quick voice dial is the main reason I have moved vlingo to the iPhone dock. I can now make a call by unlocking the phone, tapping the vlingo app (which takes about 3 seconds to load) and then tapping ‘Press + Speak’ and saying ‘call whomever’! Fast, easy to use, and it works!  What else can you ask for?

Phone Dialing Note
Not sure if you noticed, but I used the word ‘mobile’ at the end of the contacts name. This lets vingo know what number in the particular contact you would like to dial. If the contact only has one number this isn’t needed. This is also a good reason to start adding last names to your contact list so it’s easier to voice dial a particular Matt, Jim, etc.

When Will Apple Rating

Definitely could have given it 5 out of 5, but I feel that there is room to grow in the future. If they can add a hands free voice search like google then it will be golden!

Follow me on Twitter @justin_horn



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  1. Vlingo - The iPhone Blog Forums
    December 4th, 2008 12:38 am

    [...] is quick little review I just wrote up [app review] vlingo comes to iPhone | When Will Apple? __________________ [...]

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