Vito Voice Dialer PE is a pretty self-explanatory piece of software. It's software for the Pocket PC Phone - both Pocket PC 2002 and Windows Mobile 2003 based editions - which enables you to dial contacts using just a button press and your own voice.

Recently updated to v3.0, this is the first time I've seriously tried any voice recognition application on my devices (other than my ancient Nino 300, which admittedly didn't do that bad a job, even with just the cut-down software included in ROM). I've previously had mobile phones with voice recognition, but always found them too frustrating and buggy to seriously consider using.

We thought it would be interesting to do two reviews; the first by myself, and the other by one of our moderators, Dave, who had previously expressed concern about the performance of voice dialers with his accent. My review will be part I, and Dave's part II, in order to give you (we hope) a reasonably good overview of the software. Dave's is on his XDA II, while mine is on my second incarnation of the device, my new i-mate Pocket PC Phone. Both devices are identical, so we didn't expect any differences to arise in the course of the review. I recently killed my old XDA I (I think) while trying to repair my XDA II, so there was no opportunity to test on the original Pocket PC Phone platform.

The Software

Vito Voice Dialer PE 3.0 is available from http://www.vitotechnology.com. A 14 day free trial is available for download, and I certainly encourage you to take advantage of the trial. The download is only 300Kb, although a CAB file version is available which is 800kb in size.

Installation is relevatively painless, with the PC setup taking only seconds. The software has a reasonably small footprint (around 600Kb), although this will grow as you record voice tags.

I found setup extremely simple without recourse to documentation. It was fairly self-evident that the expected usage of VITO was to assign a hardware button to the VITO Voice Dialer application, and I did so from the Buttons applet of my XDA II. VITO have another piece of software available, ButtonMapper, which offers enhanced button assignments and macros - I was sorely tempted to install it, given that my only "spare" hardware button was the infrequently used Camera... but ultimately I decided that Camera could go.

I then began recording voice tags. You do so from the VITO Voice Dialer applet in Control Panel (System tab). One of the first things I noticed was that the developers used a drop-down box to list all contacts. Now, I'm reasonably lucky, and am able to keep my Contacts list fairly small as a rule; I regularly clean up old contacts and rely on my mail server's indexing capabilities to permit me to find many contact details from old emails (not infallible, but hey; works for me). I can see, though, that for some who keep massive lists of contacts, this could be a major issue.

Nonetheless, I was reasonably happy with the functionality of the applet. A second drop-down box lists all numbers associated with the selected contact. Pick a number, and press Record. You are then expected to say their name (or nickname, or whatever you like), and this is recorded as a small WAV file in the VoiceDialer_wav folder under Vito's installation folder. The smallest WAV file I have seen generated by Voice Dialer is around 17.2k, which would be "Emma" recorded with no background noise. Others, such as "Steven Mobile" recorded while in the car with quite a bit of background noise, took as much as 55k. This would be an important consideration for those with limited memory, and might mean that it's necessary to consider installation to an SD card.

A "Test" function was also available in this applet. I didn't really understand the purpose of this until I read the manual. It seems that it compares each of your voice tags for "Congeniality", or how likely Voice Dialer would be to mix two voice tags. An interesting function, as it helps you determine which tags you might wish to re-record or even change. I'll talk about my experience with "congeniality" later on.

The Control Panel applet more or less forms the core of Voice Dialer. There's no other functionality available, other than the voice recognition application itself. I must say that keeping it simple certainly does have something to recommend itself, although I'd like the ability to customise some application behaviour.

Usage

For myself, the choice of the Camera button was actually a good one. I was never much inclined to use the hardware buttons of my Pocket PC's, at least until I reviewed Destinator. Nowadays I have Destinator assigned to the Calendar button, Inbox assigned to the Contacts button, a screen capture program assigned to the Record button, and now Vito on the Camera button, and I use all quite happily and more or less automatically. Although I found myself once or twice trying to launch the Camera application, I'll sort that out later; perhaps Vito ButtonMapper will get a workout after all.

The Camera button was perfectly placed for it to become etched in my mind - when going to make a call, I would almost automatically reach for it. I even found it to be a reasonably suitable placement when in the car and using the Arkon PDA mount, where I make considerable use of my Inbox and Destinator button mappings.

It's here that I hit my first hurdle, though. I'd hit the Camera button to launch Voice Dialer, only to realise that I hadn't recorded a tag for the person I wanted to call. And unfortunately Vito doesn't lend itself that well to operation while in-car, so recording the tag had to wait until I could stop. I imagine I could use the ButtonMapper application's macro capabilities to take care of this for me, but that's outside of the scope of this reviw.

Voice Dialer works by "listening" to your input over around 2-3 seconds once you've launched the Voice Dialer application. In my context, this means hitting the Camera button and speaking the name of the person exactly as recorded for the voice tag. It analyzes your input, compares with existing voice tags, and if a match is found, displays the contact associated with the matching voice tag (as well as playing the voice tag itself). It gives you 3 seconds in which to respond by tapping "Correct" or "Wrong", and then proceeds to dial the number if you haven't cancelled by tapping Wrong. Apparently this can also be cancelled by using an assigned button, but I didn't test this.

If no match is found, an audible "ding" is heard, and it will also display No matches found. In all instances - whether a match is found or not - the end result is that Voice Dialer exits, but in the case of a match, it will commence dialling first.

Performance

My Australian-accented voice is somewhat quiet and the way in which I speak or pronounce words can vary quite a bit depending upon my mood. For this reason, I've never seemed to have much luck with voice recognition, and especially those which require pre-recorded tags. I wasn't sure how Vito would deal with it.

Typically I found that voice recognition worked well, and very fast. I did have some issues with "congeniality", where I would say "Emma" and get "Virginia", for example. At the time I found it rather frustrating, but I got around the issue by recording a few absurd voice tags such as "That one with the blonde hair". It worked, but bear in mind I was being silly. All I really needed to do was record better tags, and it would have saved some embarrassment in public...

I did find Voice Dialer frustrating with single syllable words, as a rule. "Home" and "Emma" were two particularly sore points, and it seemed to me as though it was better geared toward multiple words. Nonetheless, I found it performed quite admirably with the majority of voice tags I recorded, even with a reasonable level of background noise.

One disadvantage of Voice Dialer's approach is the need for it to do the comparison against different voice tags. Although I'm sure Vito have incorporated some smarts into the application in order to reduce the time this requires, I wonder how people with a large number of contacts and voice tags would fare. I suspect that recognition time would be slowed quite dramatically above a certain number.

It's slightly annoying to have to use a hardware button to launch, but this does have two benefits; first, you're not stuck with yet another process running all the time, and second, you're not draining battery for what would need to be a very regular polling of the hardware. Thus I can live without this, although it might perhaps be nice to have this as an optional "mode" that could be switched on, for example, when you're connected to a power source such as a car charger... then enabling the ability to say a pre-defined voice tag which prepares Voice Dialer to receive a contact name. It's a thought, anyway.

Overall

I have to say that, all in all, I'm suitably impressed by Voice Dialer. Although I have my gripes, I think it does quite a fair job of recognising my contacts, and at USD$15.95 from Handango, it may well prove to be an affordable alternative to the USD$39.99 Voice Command from Microsoft. Given that Vito offer free lifetime support, registration code renewals, and updates - and Voice Dialer is also available for Smartphone - they certainly have some advantages over Microsoft's product, which still remains Pocket PC only and for which major updates will not be free. Perhaps we should do a review of the Smartphone edition as well; it's certainly software worth considering!

Vito Voice Dialer PE 3.0 Overall Score

Good: Simple installation Easy configuration Reasonably accurate Short and to the point, no nonsense manual  Pocket PC and Smartphone editions available

Bad: Need to record voice tags prior to use May degrade in performance with large numbers of voice tags and/or contacts Will increase in memory usage over time due to storage of WAV files "Congeniality" means that  you may get the wrong contact returned if you don't re-record the tag Single syllable voice tags may be an issue

Verdict: I do like Voice Dialer, and I'll continue to use it. I'd like to see how the Smartphone version operates, and to do a comparison against other products (especially Microsoft's Voice Command), but all in all I feel it's a solid piece of work for what seems to be a very reasonable price! Matt's Score : 7 / 10