Create Textual Email by Voice on iPhone for $0.99

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Just last week James was considering all of the ways to get text input on a tablet. But many of those approaches can or should apply to our handsets as well. So when I saw Michael Connick’s tweet and blog post on QuickVoice Pro, I had to take a look at the iPhone app. With it, you record a voice message to your iPhone and the application will create a textual e-mail from your speech. After watching the video demo, I dropped $0.99 for the app (iTunes link) — I risked the buck, so you don’t have to ;) — and gave it a try.

The QuickVoice Pro interface is simple with only two buttons: Record and Play. You don’t have to send your messages to anyone, so this could double up as a personal memo recorder as well. Once you’ve completed recording your speech, you can email the actual audio file or email the recording as text. Choosing the second option shoots your recorded audio to SpinVox servers, where they’re transcribed. The demo video says that transcription and receipt of the textual email is around 10 minutes, and in my own test, I received a transcribed email in nine minutes. But I probably wouldn’t use this for any super-urgent or timely emails. In the end, your mail recipient will get an email of the text as well as a .WAV file of your actual recording — that’s handy in case of any transcription errors.

My simple test yielded very good results in terms of transcription. Here’s the text I received: “This is a test of the quick voice to text email application that it’s 99 cents in the iTunes app store. I’m sending this message to myself just to see how long it takes. Time ___ is 1:48pm.” And here is the accompanying .WAV audio file — the only errors I see: the word “is” was transcribed as “it’s,” as highlighted, and the word “stamp” after “Time” wasn’t recognized.

A few gotchas jumped out at me during my usage. For starters, you can’t use transcription for email if your recording is over 30 seconds long. That means you’ll either need to talk fast or use this for short emails. And I’m not too keen on how many button presses it still takes to create the email — although you can press a button to choose email recipients from your iPhone Contacts, typing an email address doesn’t auto-complete. Ideally, I’d like to see more optimization in future releases to address this, but for $0.99 right now, this is a good start. The Apple Blog  pointed out one minor issue in their review earlier this year — product placement. Each email sent through QuickVoice Pro contains this footer: “‘QuickVoice Email – spoken through SpinVox‘” Some will balk at that since this is a paid app.

I suspect there might be other alternatives to create email from speech on the iPhone, so if you’re using one, drop a note in the comments. And I’m surprised that Google hasn’t offered something like this natively on the Android platform. They use speech recognition for searches and obviously have a strong product with Gmail — shouldn’t they be combined? If Google or a third-party did that, let me know because I’d love to take a closer look — or listen, as the case may be.

 
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