Mobile Voice Recognition

Speech recognition for mobile devices

According to David Pogue of The New York Times, "speech recognition over cellphone is a sort of high-tech holy grail." Due to the inherent limitations in cell-phone use, such as inconsistent connection quality and background noise, developing reliable voice-activated applications for phones is a greater challenge than PC-based speech recognition.

A couple of products on the market work with PDAs and smartphones. Microsoft Voice Command 1.6 (*Est. $40) lets owners of PocketPCs, PDAs and smartphones (running Windows Mobile 5 or Windows Mobile 6) to perform many hands-free functions, such as looking up contacts and calendar information, operating MP3 and media-player functions, and voice dialing. While owners say it works well enough, Voice Command can't transcribe email or text messages. Reviews at CNET say it does work well for its intended functions, however.

Nuance VSuite is included in many Motorola, Nokia, Panasonic and Samsung cell phones. You can't purchase VSuite separately, but if you own or buy one of these phones, you can use VSuite to transcribe text and email messages. Other voice-command capabilities include hands-free dialing.

Tellme (Free), Vlingo (Free) and Nuance Voice Control (*Est. $6 per month) are all applications designed to allow smartphone users to perform voice-controlled web searches and compose email and text messages. Reviews are limited; IT systems specialist Aseem Kishore blogs about all three and shows a preference for Vlingo, which has the handy capability of learning from its mistakes and intuitive, streamlined commands. Vlingo is available in versions that run on BlackBerry phones, certain Nokia smartphones, the Apple iPhone and an assortment of Windows Mobile smartphones.