Gizmodo: voice dialing

Palm Treo 800w Gets Bluetooth Voice Dialing Via Software Update

Jason Chen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Treo 800w users can finally do voice dialing over their Bluetooth headsets with this software update pack. One caveat is that you'll need to have the TREO800w-1.03-SPNT as your current "Software Version" under your About screen, so if you don't, you'll have to update to that first. What's the point of using your Bluetooth headset in the car for safety reasons when you have to look down at your phone to dial anyway? [Palm]

Voice Dial iPhone App Gets App Store'd

Jason Chen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:30:00 EDT

The previously good Voice Dial jailbreak app for iPhone has made its way onto the App Store, complete with $25 price tag. Voice Dial isn't to be confused with iSpeak, another voice dialing app that will probably hit the App Store sometime.

There's another current SpeechCloud voice dialing app on the App Store, and even though it may be free, it's got an average rating of 2.5 stars and reviews saying that it's pretty lousy. We'd make like a petting zoo and pony up the $25 for a good voice dialing app if we really needed one. Oh, and don't pay attention to the lousy 1 star reviews on the site, all these idiots are reviewing the app based on its $25 price tag and not how well it's functioning. [VoiceDial]

iPhone Gets Voice Dialing With iSpeak

Jason Chen — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:22:22 EDT

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]

Voice Dial iPhone Voice Dialing App Costs Money, But Works Well

Jason Chen — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:00:52 EST

Adam of Lifehacker points us to this Voice Dial application for the iPhone, which allows you to record voice samples for any contact on your address book and bring it up just by talking. You can activate voice dialing with the two-press home button trick introduced in iPhone 1.1.1, but you can even put tags on actions like checking your websites, opening email or doing some Google Mapping. Voice dialing is one of the iPhone's missing features we lamented about in the iPhone Book we wrote, but Voice Dial (even if it costs $33) goes a long way to patching it up. Plus, $5 off now for a limited time! [Makayama via Lifehacker]