Having third-party apps fill in the missing holes in iPhone's functionality seems to be a genius idea, since Fonix has done the voice dialing legwork for Apple with their iSpeak app. The app consists of "a run-time engine that sits on the phone," which says always-running app to us, that can listen for names on your contact list and dial them. Also, you can look for songs in your music library by saying the name of the artist, song or playlist.

There's no further info or pricing specs, but the fact that Apple's SDK limitations prohibit applications from running in the background isn't brought up anywhere in Fonix's release. Even the recent announcement at WWDC of a helper app that third-party apps can hook into for network notifications isn't quite the same as keeping a voice-dialing application running in the background. We'll see how they manage to pull the app off with these limitations. [Fonix via TUAW]

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