VoiceBox Dialer

by Eric March on November 11, 2008 at 11:10 am

(8 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)

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App Name: VoiceBox Dialer
Developer: VoiceBox Technologies Corp.
Category: Utilities

Another voice dialing app.  What makes this one different though is that the voice recognition is not performed on-board.  It is instead offloaded to a remote server (thus a data connection is required) for processing.  As a result of this however, recognition time tends to be longer, particularly over 3G — 4-5 seconds between the time you speak and the time it spits out a result.  I don’t want to know what EDGE times are like.

If its recognition times are slower, however, the fact that speech recognition is handled externally by a much more robust engine, accuracy seems to be higher.  It was able to recognize more of what I said more accurately than the other voice dialers I’ve tried.  It still had trouble sometimes, but by and large it worked well, and was able to come up with phonetically close matches when it didn’t know exactly what I meant.  It can tell the difference between names and direct-dial numbers, and can even interpret letters as numbers.  Names can be partially matched.  You can also specify which number to dial — i.e. “Call Bubba on his cell,” or “Call Steve at home.”

One of my complaints here is that there’s no option for autodial (i.e. it will begin dialing as soon as it recognizes who you want to call and where), and you have to tap to confirm your selection.  It would be much nicer if, like my former Treo 750w, it would speak the match it thinks it has found and allow you to respond with a verbal “yes” or “no” to confirm or cancel.  One of the main aims of voice dialing is non-contact contacting, you might say.  This is partly unavoidable with the iPhone due to its inability to handle voice dialing natively, so some amount of tapping is required to get into the app and inform it that you’re about to give it a voice command.  After that however it should be able to listen to you until it has connected a call or you have commanded it to cancel voice operation.  If you can’t have fully hands-free operation, then you should at least try and keep physical contact to a minimum, and scrolling through a list of possible matches is not the sort of thing that’s going to play nice with new cell phone laws currently coming to pass.

The second problem with this app is that the voice that talks back to you is rather loud — fine if you’re in a noisy environment, but otherwise, not so much.  This wouldn’t be a problem except that when you use the volume rocker to turn it down, you’re effecting your ringer volume.  The iPhone is capable of distinguising between and storing individually numerous different types of volume settings — application, general, bluetooth, headphone, ringer, and so on, and it is up to the developer to use one of these types to control its internal volume.  VoiceBox does not.  It uses ringer volume, so it the app’s volume is too loud you have to turn down the ringer volume, which means you have to turn it back up again when you’re done.

Overall though it’s a pretty good voice dialing app — but if you ask me, for totally hands-free operation, I’m seriously considering going with a BlueAnt V1.  Then I won’t need any of these apps.

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Posted in Utilities