How to enter information when travelling, when on the road, while driving, walking – away from the keyboard? If you did not take your notes in the moment when the ideas appear – they could get lost.

The easiest way seems to be to use two things that are available in most cases: Your voice and your mobile phone.

There are several applications available which are not only able to take voice notes but to do voice recognition. This means that you get text at the end of the process. Sounds good, but…

• unfortunately most software may be right for native English speakers but the recognition rate is lower for people with a different mother tongue. And if you have to do a lot of corrections the system is not productive anymore.
• the voice recognition is mostly done on a server and not on the phone itself. To do that, the voice data has to be transfered from the phone to the server and the text back to the phone.
• Some services provide a dial-in number to connect to the server but when the dial-in numbers are located in another country it is a very expensive way.
• Other services use a data connection to transfer the information. If you have a data plan with your provider, you are in your home country, you have a good internet connection and the servers of your service are available – all things are fine. Otherwise it will be an expensive or unusable service.

At the creation date of this article in February, 2010 I found several services providing very different systems. In the meantime we are close to a hype as Apple delivered Siri as a standard application on the iphone 4S. To be honest, Google delivered voice recognition with the Android OS and additional applications before that point of time – but it was mostly used to replace text entry by voice. So there was no real control of the device by voice and you were not able to avoid typing on the smartphone.

In early 2010 I was looking on the following services:

• Dial2Do: No dial-in number e.g. in Germany. Only English as language available. This is still the truth.
• Jott: Nuance has acquired Jott. Now you will find the following information on the homepage: “Now, nearly two years after Jott’s acquisition and a successful integration into Nuance, we are officially ending the Jott service on May 3rd, 2011.”
• Nuance: Nuance is a leading provider of speech solutions for businesses and consumers. A dragon version for the iPhone is available for different languages and you could switch between them. For android devices we have the flexT9 application. I could confirm that the voice recognition of the flexT9 is excellent for german language and the other input capabilities are great for entering text very fast.
• Spinvox: Nuance has acquired Spinvox. I had the chance to test the system with German voice recognition with a dial-in number in Germany. Now this service has been terminated for users in Germany and the label said: coming soon. Afterwards there was a statement dated March 19, 2010 saying SpinVox was acquired by Nuance Communications in December, and to further align with our commitment to serving telephone network operators, we will no longer offer our free voice-to-text services directly to consumers.
• ReQall: I like this service as it has a native iPhone and blackberry application and a web service. It needs no dial-in number. The voice data and the texts are transfered via data communication (WAN/WLAN). It is possible to enter tasks and events via voice into a calendar application, Google Calendar and Outlook! A free service is available. The recognition rate may be OK for native English speakers. But there seems to be no roadmap to support more languages. That is a problem during the daily usage when you have to enter proper names in languages other than English.
• Siri: At the moment siri is only available as part of Apples iOS system and only allowed to run on newer Apple hardware (e.g. iphone 4S). The interface possibilities and the services are controlled by Apple and not usable in all countries.
• Vlingo: Vlingo is my favorite on the android system. An excellent voice recognition with the possibility to e.g. control the smartphone by sending SMS, e-mail via voice and text-to-speech capability. Right now Nuance announces to acquire Vlingo. If we see the same situation as with the other services acquired by Nuance is not clear.
• Voiceonthego: Voiceonthego announced to support German and has a dial-in number in Germany. I haven’t had the chance to test the system.

Nuance seems to have the best recognition engine and I have my own positive experiences with Nuance software. A lot of services are based on the Nuance engine. Since several years Nuance acquires their competitors. Most services are closed afterwards.

Most services for mobile systems try to compete with Siri from Apple. Right now the integration of Android from Google and Voice Action is not as deep as Siri in case of voice control. But there is a rumor that Google will launch a service in the very near future. We will see.

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