AAUG Reviews

by Ron Schoedel, AAUG Member

Belgian developer Creaceed has brought the iPhone what I think is the nicest voice-dialing app. There are others out there, but few perform as simply and ably, or with as little user intervention, as Vocalia. And as a bonus, Vocalia handles English and French speech.

First: the problem. iPhone has no built in voice dialing, the way many phones do. Given how awful some phones’ voice dailers are, some users consider this good that Apple didn’t bother trying to replicate that functionality. However, many users who are otherwise pleased with their iPhones have missed this function. Those persons who like to chat on their phones while driving, bicycling, or doing other activities that limit manual interaction with their phones are the most likely to use a voice dialer. In many states, use of a cellular phone in an automobile is only permitted legally if one uses a voice dialer and a hands free speaker or ear piece. Creaceed developed Vocalia as a way to meet the need for voice dialing on the iPhone. And from my experience with the app, they did a great job.

Vocalia has a nicely designed icon of a purple “eye” and a waveform that one taps on their iPhone screen to launch the app. I placed Vocalia in the dock at the bottom of my iPhone screen, replacing the generic iPhone phone icon. To dial my phone, I tap the Vocalia app, and within a moment, I have a larger purple “eye” dominating my screen, indicating that the app is ready to listen to me. At this point, I just talk. I just state the name of a contact and wait a moment while Vocalia tracks down whichever contacts sound similar to what I voiced. Depending on how similar your contacts’ names are, this could return just a couple, or maybe half a dozen or more possible contacts. However many it returns, it is far simpler to choose from those few than it is to scroll through hundreds of contacts while doing other things.

From here, you glance at the returned contacts, and tap the correct one. Then, presto, iPhone dials and connects you to your contact.

Accuracy is very good. A few times I got some quirky results, which could have been the result of not talking loudly enough, or perhaps due to background noise. But easily 95% of the time I got a match on exactly who I was looking for. That level of accuracy beats my old Nokia phone whose voice dialer was notoriously confused.

As may be apparent, using Vocalia is pretty straightforward, and there are only a couple places where Vocalia could stand some improvements. Firstly, the time to launch, from when I tap the icon to when it will accept audible input, it about five seconds. I know that is not long, but it seems long, and perception these days is everything. We consumers of high tech expect everything to happen immediately (”Hurry up, I don’t have all second!”). While I have grown accustomed to the momentary wait, it was off-putting at first, and could be for new users. Then again, I imagine that launching an app and doing whatever it has to do to tap into your contact database must be a very intense computational task. I’m willing to overlook this one, for the most part.

But, instead of just offering me a list of contacts and then requiring me to look at my phone and tap the correct one, I’d love to see a way to auto-dial**** (See update below). Because Vocalia lets you tweak the phonemes that link to each contact, it should be possible that after you have finely tuned (trained) Vocalia, that it could autodial without any interaction from the user after speaking the name. Perhaps the app could offer, as does one other voice dialing app, a momentary delay between returning the name and dialing, as that would offer you the opportunity to glance at your screen and verify that the correct contact has been selected.

The positives of Vocalia are many. What truly makes Vocalia stand out is it’s ability to fine tune the vocalizations that invoke each contact, down to defining “Ronald” as “r aa n aa l d”, or altering that slightly if necessary due to variations in my friends’ names. I can also define a contact with a nickname, “best friend”, “snow plow guy”, or “poker buddy” or whatever, by typing in similar vocalizations to match the names of those persons. The neatest thing is that I can have multiple phonetizations for each name. So, on those days that your significant other is in your good graces, you could speak “my honeybee” or “my manly man” and have her or his name pop up ready for you to whispher sweet nothings into their iPhone. Or, for those days when they may have rolled out of bed on the wrong side, you could speak “boss lady” or “boorish creep” and likewise be connected to the object of your, ahem, affection. (Disclaimer: I have not actually tried this, as I only ever have the utmost affection for my significant other).

Another real plus is the ability to split first and last names. For example, I could speak “Steve Jobs” and get back a list of just Steve Jobs’ phone numbers (home, mobile, office, yacht, jet); or speak “Steve” and get back a list of all my contacts whose first name is Steve.

Vocalia is also easier to use than the other voice dialers. There is no “press to speak” button that one must hold down while talking. Instead, the great purple eye listens to your voice and the wave form animation shown on-screen confirms that it is hearing you. The animation is cool and useful.

My buying advice is that for those for whom voice dialing is indispensible, Vocalia represents the best of the available apps. With a few more finishing touches, this would be a five-star app***. It is quite good. If you have any French contacts, its bilingualism is a necessity.

*** 12/18/08 Update: Auto-dial has now been added as a feature in the latest Vocalia update. The feature works exactly as I would expect. It is an option, so once you have Vocalia perfectly trained for your contacts’ names, you can comfortably allow Vocalia to Autodial for you. A timed dial feature is also available, to allow you a moment to cancel the call if desired. I’ve updated the rating of Vocalia to five moose.