Video: Vlingo Plus voice to text control demoed on Nokia N8 – Free at Ovi Store

Duncan tipped us the other day that Vlingo is available at the Ovi Store. Is this the full version? It’s called Vlingo “Plus”?

Anyway, I’ve missed this app ever since moving from the N97. It looks a little different to the Vlingo we saw demoed on the E7, receiving some nice UI tweaks

http://store.ovi.com/content/101269

All you need to do is tap the button and speak. Tap again when you’ve finished. By default it will perform a google search. The “What Can I say” button gives you a list of actions you can do with Vlingo and clicking each one shows you how to do it.

I love that Vlingo shows you what things you can say and how to do it. E.G. fo EMAIL you can say the name of the contact, subject and message. I think it helps a lot when you have a feature packed app for the application to set out for you any and every eventuality you could perform with it.

You even get these suggestions/tips in the main app view itself. You can tap them to change to a new tip.

• Simple voice to text web search
• Voice to text email
• Voice to text SMS
• Voice dialling (with ability to specify which number, ie. mobile)
• Voice app launch
• Voice to text notes
• Voice to text facebook updates

It works quite well and is accurate most of the time for “normal words” i.e. not product codes. I find that it is more accurate when you speak in your normal speaking voice (as opposed to purposely trying to speak more clearly, at least for me anyway). It is way more accurate than Windows 7’s speech recognition software, even after several training sessions. I wouldn’t trust it without checking though. Autocorrect when typing is bad enough. Obviously, this works better in a quiet environment though for me, it does seem to pick up my voice better than the background murmur.

I really like Vlingo. There’s definitely the cool factor when showing it off to your friends and it’s also quite useful too if you don’t want to type a message out. Might be a good hands free option?

I’m not sure though if there’s a shortcut way to activate the tap and speak button (or a way for vlingo to know I’ve stopped dictating other than pressing tap again). The time it takes to transcribe voice varies. Sometimes it’s quick and sometimes it takes several seconds. This may be linked to your signal (of which mine was really bad). Speaking of signal, I think every time you click the blue button, you will use data (as evident of the interference sound in the video). You don’t hear this when using the app.

Have you tried it? What do you think?

Tags: featured

Category: Applications, Nokia, Nseries, Symbian, Video