I was recently given the opportunity to review the latest version of Vito Voice Dialer and jumped at the chance of finding an effective way to streamline the use of my Xda II as a phone. The only other voice recognition software I have used is MS Voice Command, which I loved and will use as a benchmark. With me having a reasonably strong Northern English accent Matt and I were interested to see whether recognition performance will be hampered.
You can download Vito Voice Dialer PE 3.0 from http://www.vitotechnology.com. A 14 day trial is available, and thereafter it will cost USD$15.95.
Setup
This is the downpoint of Vito in comparison to VoiceCommand as you have to assign a "tag" to each of your contacts. The process itself is very easy however and took me a matter of only minutes to setup enough contacts for me to perform my tests.
From the Vito setup application you simply need to select the contact from the drop down of contacts as well as the contact number (e.g. Mobile) and then record the tag. Easy Peasy!
Also from within setup, you are able to delete tags that you have recorded aswell as play them to check what it was you actually used for your bosses number!
Match that tag
To use the application I mapped a hard button to Vito which helped immensely in improving the use whilst driving in the car.
After pressing the button a popup is shown which shows you the three stages being performed; listening, processing, displaying. During the displaying phase the matched contact and the accuracy of the match is shown along with two buttons which allow you to call or cancel the calling of the contact. If you dont select one of the two buttons the contact is dialled after a couple of seconds pause.
Using Vito
Unfortunately, or more accurately, fortunately, I don't use my Xda II as a mobile phone very often. At most i make about 3 calls a day, generally to the same numbers, so some creative testing Strategies were thought up and tried. For the following tests I had 15 contacts tagged, which is not a great deal in reality.
Test 1 - In the house
The first test I did was simply ensuring the software worked okay in a nice quiet environment. The software was working very well in this environment so i decided to throw some ambient noise into the mix. Add a spot of tv and the Kettle boiling and I was sure to reduce the success rate. Right ? Wrong! Even with all this noise I still got 40% accuracy.
Test 2 - In the car
My car is quite quiet so the car test was always going to be easy...unless I wind the window down at 80 Kmh. At this speed the match rate was quite good but twice I dialled the wrong brother! Wind up the window but crank up the air conditioning and the results were much better. In this scenario I got matches every time at quite a high rate. Add some of ''The Streets" booming from the CD player (not to loud mind you) and I was still very happy.
Test 3 - In the street
So I took the Xda II out into the main street and gave it a couple more tests and had yet more great results. Even with the large buses whizzing past all requests were successful, although I did have trouble when a boy-racer whizzed by in his V8.
Vito Voice Dialer PE 3.0 Overall Score
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Good:
- Highly accurate
- Cool progress bar and accuracy feedback
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Bad:
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Verdict:
So how does Vito rate? Well it was very accurate in my tests however I really did have only a small set of voice tags. Against MS Voice Command I have to say that I do prefer Voice Command simply because I didn't have to assign tags to my contacts and Voice Command also provides better audible feedback as to which contact was matched.
Dave's Score : 7.5 / 10
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