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Unofficial S-Voice app gets gagged, Samsung waits for its flagship hero
Did you get a chance to download Samsung's voice assistant APK over the weekend? Don't bother trying now, as Samsung (or Vlingo, which is behind the app) has locked down access for unauthorized devices -- namely anything that isn't a Galaxy S III. According to xda-developers, S-Voice's command requests are being rebuffed once Vlingo's servers detect any phone that's presumably not inspired by nature. There's just over a week to go, however, and soon you'll be able to shoot the breeze with your new smartphone love all you want.
Vlingo co-founder explains data-collection issues
With Carrier IQ and O2's most recent data-snooping, people's vigilance about what information cellphones transmit is increasing. Using a Galaxy Note, AndroidPit found that every four minutes, Vlingo's voice-recognition app was sending a packet of data to an unencrypted server. The packet contained your GPS co-ordinates, IMEI (unique device identifier), contact list and the title of every song stored on your device -- without proper warning in the privacy policy you agree to when starting up the app. We spoke with co-founder John Wynn, product marketing head TJ Leonard and communications manager Erin Keleher, who gave us a full and frank discussion about what's going on and the steps it's taking to remedy the situation, which we've got for you after the break.
Daily Update for December 21, 2011
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen.
Nuance gobbles up Vlingo, yearns to transcribe its own announcement
Apparently, if you can't (legally) beat them, you buy them. Such is the thinking over at Nuance, who has decided to acquire its competitor and former courtroom dance partner, Vlingo. Should make for some nice additions to the former's voice recognition tubes -- technology which powers everything from Apple's Siri, Dragon dictation and even various autos. No indications as to how many greenbacks exchanged hands, but the newlyweds were happy to boast their "complementary research and development efforts" will result in a company "stronger together than alone." We'll have to see about that. PR after the break.
Nuance to acquire rival Vlingo
Nuance, the company behind the Dragon apps and a whole slew of other popular software suites, has decided to acquire its rival Vlingo, another voice-to-text software developer. VentureBeat says it's for an undisclosed sum, but even though the two companies have sued and counter-sued over a series of patent applications, they're apparently putting those quibbles to rest, and instead will combine forces to beef up their voice-to-text solutions. Siri has apparently lit a fire under the voice control market lately, and of course voice recognition is a big part of that. Siri was very impressive as just an iPhone app, but with the full weight of Apple's hardware support (not to mention marketing budget) behind it, voice control is inspiring a lot of R&D and funding, both in Cupertino and elsewhere in the tech industry. Nuance has fought to be the de facto standard for a lot of voice recognition software in the past with its Dragon Naturally Speaking apps, and that kind of thing is likely to become even more popular going forward. Or as Nuance's own senior VP Mike Thompson puts it in a press release, "Inspired by the introduction of services such as Apple's Siri and our own Dragon Go!, virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet is looking for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications and services. By acquiring Vlingo, we are able to accelerate the pace of innovation to meet this demand."
Samsung Galaxy S II review
If you don't already know all about the Samsung Galaxy S II, where have you been the past two months? The successor to one of the most popular Android handsets to date carries a burden of expectation almost as sizable as its 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus screen. It promises to be thinner, lighter, and faster than the Galaxy S that preceded it, while garnishing Android 2.3.3 with a set of TouchWiz customizations that might actually enhance, rather than hinder, the user experience. As such, the Galaxy S II earns Samsung full marks for ambition, but does this slinky new smartphone live up to its interstellar hype? The answer, as always, can be found after the break. %Gallery-122444%
Vlingo bows to Google Voice Actions, makes Android version free of charge
When Google Navigation hit the scene, it sounded the death knell for paid GPS on Android, so you can imagine the doom and gloom at Vlingo HQ last week when Google released the similar Voice Actions for free. As it turns out, however, Vlingo's not going to give up that easily; Vlingo for Android, once a $10 download, is now free as well. In a surprisingly gracious blog post that genuinely congratulates Google on the accomplishment, CEO Dave Grannan explains that he wants Android users to be able to freely compare the services as Vlingo adds features further down the road, and makes one valid point in his firm's favor -- you can try Vlingo now if you've got Android 2.0 or above, but Google's service only runs on Froyo. Interestingly enough, Vlingo on Android was the only version that actually charged; on Nokia, Blackberry and Windows Mobile, however, you could purchase a "Plus" license. Perhaps the company's not quite as generous as we thought, but there's still no arguing with a free voice command service that also reads your email aloud -- go ahead and give it a try.
Vlingo 2 adds more voice power to iPhone
In the burgeoning market for iPhone voice recognition apps, the free Dragon Dictate clearly holds the top spot. In fact, this paragraph was dictated using DragonDictate (with some minor edits after the fact). However, the application doesn't always shine when it comes to getting your text quickly and easily into different places where you might want to use it. You can send an e-mail or a text message if you want to, but you can't update your Facebook status or send a Twitter message without copying and pasting. Performing a search requires an entirely separate app. To make your dictation process easier -- at least when it comes to getting your text to go where you want, when you want -- there's the latest update to the Vlingo app, which we first reviewed last June. Vlingo 2.0 is trying to up the ante for text recognition by putting all the 'next step' options in one convenient place. You can search (Google, Yahoo, or Bing), find map items, dial your contacts (with optional contact name upload to Vlingo's servers to improve recognition) and update your Facebook or Twitter status. For email or SMS, you have two in-app purchase options to extend the free app's capabilities; it's $6.99 for either SMS or email action, $9.99 for both. Vlingo has gotten a thorough UI overhaul in this new version, and it's quite a bit easier to use than it was. The dictation button can be used in hold-down or tap-to-talk mode, and the app can be set to recognize speech on launch for maximum speed. You can specify what action you want by speaking it: "Email Joey, Subject how about some coffee, Message Got time to meet me at Starbucks? You're buying!" will create and address an outgoing email for you, all in one step.
Report: iPhone, Android, Blackberry users use the same apps
I'm not sure if this is a fascinating peek at the way we're wired or an obvious conclusion based on reason, but I'll let you decide. Despite the fact that they seem to be polar opposites on Internet forums and comment sections, Android, Blackberry, and iPhone users all end up using mostly the same apps. That's according to an "app discovery service" over on Facebook called Mplayit, which tracked 42,000 visitors and the apps they preferred for a set of "genres." Turns out that for the various categories, the same cross-platform apps tended to be the most popular on the different platforms. Evernote topped the charts for Lists and Notes, Shazam and Pandora were on all three lists for music, and apps like Yelp and Facebook sat high on the chart for multiple platforms. In the end, an app is an app is an app, "app"arently, and it doesn't really matter which platform you're using it on. There were a few difference of course -- in the "Utilities" section, things were different for each platform. Bump is the most popular for iPhone, Google Goggles was most popular on Android, and Vlingo won on Blackberry. As far as I know, with the possible exception of Bump, those are all platform-exclusive apps. But in general, if an app is available on multiple platforms, a popular app on one platform means it'll be popular on the other. Good to know both for developers (a hit in one place means a hit somewhere else, too) and for consumers: next time you choose a smartphone, the apps probably won't matter as much as the hardware features.
Vlingo adds voice control to older iPhones
Pity the poor iPhone 3G owner who now has to grapple with reality; yes, what was until Friday the world's coolest smartphone is now simply a piece of yesterday's tech, as current as a punchcard and as enduring as a wax cylinder recording on a hot afternoon. No, not really -- the iPhone 3G is just as cool as it was a week ago, and for $99 it's a relative bargain. Still, there's some envy on the wind. Some of our readers have apparently been so dazzled by Apple's enthusiastic promotion of the new iPhone 3G S that they were fooled into believing that the hardware-linked features of the 3G S (the compass and the voice controls, specifically) would be made available on the 3G with the delivery of the 3.0 software update. They have written to us, irate and frustrated, wanting to know what happened to their promised features. We sympathize, and we want to help. There is, as it happens, a way to get one of the marquee features of the 3G S -- voice control -- onto your iPhone 3G or original iPhone. The vlingo app, available free in the App Store since December of last year and also available for Blackberry & Windows Mobile, gives you voice command dialing from your address book, map search, Yahoo web searches, Twitter/Facebook updating, and more. The recognition quality is quite good; it's worked as well as Google Voice Search for me in most cases. Vlingo is quite a bit slower to recognize audio on the 3G than the built-in Voice Control is on the 3G S (unsurprisingly, considering the horsepower boost on the new phone); it also does not allow iTunes control, while Apple's tool does. Despite these drawbacks, it's fun to use and very slick. Update: As Eitan points out in the comments, vlingo's speed is not necessarily limited by the local processing power, since it depends on the remote server for audio analysis. One of the major points of contention regarding vlingo, and a cause of many negative reviews on the App Store, is that the app does have to do something a little bit touchy in order to enable voice dialing: it asks if it can upload your contact names to vlingo. While this is a necessary step if you want to use voice dialing, and while the company says it does not include phone numbers with that upload nor does it use the information for any purpose other than creating spoken profiles to recognize the names of your contacts when you speak them, there are plenty of users who aren't comfortable with this step. If you're not OK with it, you can still use vlingo without the voice dialing feature; at that point, however, it's not dramatically better than Google's Voice Search. You can watch a video demo of vlingo in the 2nd half of this post. If you've got other workarounds or third-party apps that help 3G owners level up with their happy 3G S comrades, please let us know.