It seems as though voice controlled assistant applications are all the rage these days. BlackBerry 7 has its universal search voice prompt and we’ve also seen voice dialing for years. To date, the closest thing to Siri that BlackBerry users have seen is the popular application Vlingo. This past month, another application has appeared and has claimed that they are well on their way to being a top contender. SayIt is a voice recognition/assistant application for BlackBerry smartphones running OS 5 and higher that says it can answer any question you throw at it.
Regardless if it’s a question about the weather, a message you want to dictate or a search you want to execute, SayIt will attempt to help you get what you are looking for. Here are some examples from the developer:
- Ask anything you want and SayIt will answer you. For example: "How old is the earth?", "Who is Justin Bieber?", "1 plus 1 equals?", "Tell me about your self?",
"What's the weather like?",....and a lot more! - You can compose new Email , new Message, open BlackBerry Map, task, calendar,.... using your voice
- You can Compose SMS, Email, BBM or any text typing use your own voice!
- You can convert Text to Speech and download the converted text as *.mp3 format
- You can convert Speech to Text and copy the text to send via BBM, SMS, MMS, Email, and so on.
I did find that you had to be in a relatively quiet area in order to use SayIt .. We were in a children’s play center last weekend, sitting at the tables. I couldn’t get SayIt to understand what I was asking of it, no matter if I cupped the microphone and spoke loudly into it. It would only catch snippets of words. When performing basic searches (like weather), Say it uses Wolfram Alpha, known as an “answer engine (rather than a search engine), to obtain results. Now while it does seem to allow you to ask more questions that Vlingo, it has yet to allow you to dial numbers. It also isn’t convenience key friendly; at best, it’s a 2 click process (one click of the convenience key and another to choose what you want to do). Rather than one virtual button to house everything, there are five buttons to choose from: Text to Voice, Voice to Text, Say a command, Options and Command List. If it adds voice dialing to the mix, I think that SayIt would be a great, fully functional, application. You can grab SayIt for $4.99 from BlackBerry App World.
Contest: We have 25 copies of SayIt to give away! All you have to do is leave a comment to be entered. Contest ends this Sunday at midnight PST.
