Getting Things Done

Over at Fast Company's WorkFastTV, I caught a video with Robert Scoble interviewing David Allen, at GTD expert. Pretty cool stuff.



Enjoy,

Jaye Morris

Can you say Vlingo?

Vlingo is an iPhone app that I just discovered, that does voice recognition. Since software version 2.0, I've been looking for a good "Voice Recognition," (VR) and have only been met with disappointment.

Prior to trying Vlingo, my last big attempt was using the "Google Mobile," app which was impressively lame. I was standing there tilting the phone to my ear, wait for the "duhn, duhn" sound, which was sometimes there and sometimes not. When I did get the VR signal sometimes I didn't speak fast enough and would get only a partial submission in there. It left me just feeling frustrated and angry that they could not get it right, after all they are Google, so I expect an Apple-like experience, not a clumsy piece of crap which left me feeling rather dumb.

Enter Vlingo. First off, I was willing to give it a spin for one simple reason. It's FREE! So by trying it, I'm not out of anything other than the time I invested on the install. Upon App start, Vlingo offers a series of tips under the title of "What can I say." This is really important, since it helps you with all the key phrases, which are natural and easy to remember.

The key voice recognition phrases are "Search, Google, Yahoo, Call, Find, Map and Social." My example is "Map, Wicomico County Youth and Civic Center, " You tap the red button indicating that completes what you are looking for and boom, up comes "Map It," you press the key and there it is. Snap! You can say, "search adobe coldfusion," and search results popup for Adobe CF. by default the Yahoo! is the default search engine, but you can go into setting and change it to Google. There's no love for Ask or Microsoft Live Search, but that's how they roll. No big loss there. Everything works as expected and as it's supposed to.

The above said, there is a really cool treat. Remember when i said, you could say "social?" Well guess what? You can Facebok and Twitter update via VR. It's insanely easy to do. You configure our account, hit the social button, say what your Tweet is and your words appear on the screen, giving you a word count to boot. The accuracy is nothing short of astonishing. You hit the update button and it posts to your account. Nice.

If you are looking for Voice Recognition software for the iPhone, I really think Vlingo is it. I'm really impressed. Give it a try and post back here to share your experience. As I said, it's free and you can't beat that. Enjoy.

Jaye Morris