Symbian in Motion

VoiceMode by VoiceSignal - You Talk, VoiceMode Types

by Zach at 2:24 pm | November 20th, 2007 | Category: Application Reviews, Utilities

Last week I gave you a first look at a brand new (to S60) app called Adaptxt that provides a much-improved text input method to S60 3rd users. I’m 100% hooked on Adaptxt and really don’t know how I got along without it. Today however, I want to show you another alternative that is a bit older but it is also surprisingly not talked about as often as I would think.

VoiceMode provides users with a voice-to-text engine that can be used in place of T9 and tap in a whole host of applications. So far I’ve tested it with Messaging (SMS/email), Web, Notes, Calendar, Active Notes, Palringo and a few others and it works perfectly. In fact the only app that has had a problem with VoiceMode is the Jaiku Mobile beta, but no third-party text entry engines currently work with Jaiku Mobile.

The first thing you must do after installing this mammoth app (yes, it installs at over 6MB!) is do some training or ‘adapting’. The initial adaptation involves speaking a series of 75 sentences that are displayed on the screen. You can pause during this process and you can also continue to adapt VoiceMode with up to 250 spoken phrases. Of course the more phrases you train it with the more accurate that app becomes. You can also import up to 2,500 names from your contact list to teach them to the app.

During the adaptation process, VoiceMode listens automatically as each phrase is displayed on your screen. In practice, the app is invoked very intelligently - simply hold down the [send] key (green, call) and speak. Once you are finished speaking, release the key and VoiceMode will quickly process your message and convert it to text.

You can stop and start VoiceMode any number of times and it will pick up where it left off each time. Punctuation is spoken so if you want to input: Hi John, see you soon! you would say “Hi John comma see you soon exclamation-point”. You can also speak emoticons and Voice Mode will translate them for you. For example, “smiley-face” will yield :-).

So to input the message displayed above I held the [send] key and said, “This is a test of voicemode period it is converting my spoken voice into text period”.

Once trained, the app is surprisingly accurate. The key is to speak naturally and in short bursts. It is 50 times more accurate than the variety of dial-and-speak solutions I’ve tested but of course any voice-to-text engine is going to make mistakes. As such, VoiceSignal has made it very easy to correct any errors. You can always tap your text to make manual additions but in the event that VoiceMode gets a spoken word wrong simply move your cursor to the word (it will turn red when you reach it), click the center d-pad key and either type the correction or choose it from the listed suggestions.

Despite the massive size of the installed app VoiceMode occupies a very modest amount of RAM. ActiveFile reports just under 700KB combined for the two processes that run in the background while the app is enabled. The app isn’t perfect though and the first item on my wish list is to allow the user to easily toggle between VoiceMode and T9. Currently with the app enabled, users can toggle only between VoiceMode (which includes voice and tap) and number input methods. Actually I think that the best solution here would be to implement a hotkey shortcut (maybe pen/shift + [send]) that will enable/disable VoiceMode from any screen. The other thing I would like to see an autostart option. For someone who is constantly on the go it is a pain to have to enable the app from the settings screen each time the phone is booted.

As far as I can tell, VoiceMode is currently available in two variants; a US English edition and a UK English edition. Either can be purchased for a very reasonable EUR 9.99 (just under $15 US) from the Nokia Software Market. If anyone knows of additional versions please do drop a comment here and I’ll update this post. If you’re an English-speaker who is always on the go I can’t recommend VoiceMode enough.

Subscribe to comments made about this post

Viewing 18 Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus

Mexico