By April 1, 2010

Vlingo Mini Review

Vlingo

I have been using Vlingo for just over a week now and boy, has it made my life easier. If you have not heard of Vlingo then to summarise it, its an application that will allow you to convert speech to text.

I spend anything from two to five hours a day in my car which means if i want to email or instant message people I need to either pull over or wait until I have stopped. Not any more!

With the touch of a button Vlingo records your voice and converts it into text in pretty much any application on your phone.

Interested? Read more after the break.

 

I have been using Vlingo on my BlackBerry 9700 but the app is also available for iPhone, Windows Mobile and Nokia devices.

There are two versions of the application. A free version and the full paid version.

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The free version is really a tester for you and some of Vlingos features will not work but I  was so impressed I wanted the paid app straight away. At £14.19 in BlackBerry App World its not cheap but well worth the money.

The application is extremely easy to use and within the simple menu you are given examples of the sorts of things you can say and how Vlingo will act on them.

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As you will see in the video further down the page you can give your phone a verbal instruction e.g Twitter, and a Twitter box will open allowing you to then speak what you wish to Tweet. This works the same for Facebook, email and instant messaging.

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Its not perfect and it does sometimes take a a couple of tries to get it right but overall its a nifty little application.

A new feature that Vlingo have just started offering is Safereader.

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Once enabled Safereader will automatically start reading out your emails as they come in. Perfect as it means you don’t have to take your eyes of the road.

Vlingo uses data to make the conversions from speech to text so depending on what sort of phone you have you will need to ensure you have a data plan to cover your usage. How much data it uses is hard for me to tell as I’m still in my first month of using Vlingo but I would imagine its minimal, unless you are getting hundreds of emails a day.

Below you will see a brief demonstration of me using Vlingo on my BlackBerry.

 

HTC Desire unboxing video

 

Conclusion:

Vlingo is a life saver for me. Well nearly. Vlingo will enable you to listen to your emails as they arrive without taking your hands off of the steering wheel.

While we cant condone using a phone whilst driving, even replying to emails or instant messages is as easy as a quick press of one button on your device.

It’s reality that people do use phones in the car, hopefully only replying to emails when stationary but at least now with Vlingo this is without doubt the safest way to do it.

Posted by: James

Posted in: Reviews

About the Author:

Five year veteran of the site. BlackBerry specialist, but experienced in most operating systems. Enjoys flower arranging and cross stitch.
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