The thing about useful stuff is

vLingo - excellent Blackberry app [with unlimited data plan] Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Image via WikipediaHaving seen references to Vlingo, which claimed to give BlackBerry smartphone users control over mobile information and tasks with the power of their voice, I thought I would give it a try whilst they were running a UK beta.

It was easy to install the application and it did work very well on my Blackberry 8800, with a reasonably good accuracy rate on speech to text and in following standard commands.

However, to use this service you really need to be on an unlimited data plan, as it appears that every translation involves interaction with the server across a data connection. Whilst this is understandable, I'm speculating that this will be a data hungry process [no evidence either way].

As I'm fairly quick at typing on a Blackberry , so the imperative for the application is less than it might be. However, the convenience of initiating calls, emails, sms and text entry was appealing and it quickly became something I adopted, albeit briefly. If only T-mobile UK offered an unlimited data plan, [and one that was reasonably priced], I would certainly continue to use the application. As it is, the data costs are likely to be too prohibitive relative to the value I derive.

Presently the application is free and I see from their web site that they have enabled Yahoo search within the application, which may well be generating some referral fees for the company.

Labels: blackberry, Smartphone, Speech recognition, t-mobile

posted by John Wilson @ 3:27 PM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit

Viewdle - Finding faces in the news Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Viewdle is could be considered yet another facial recognition software offering that claims to be able to identify individuals in video for the purposes of searching and index such output. What differentiates it, is that Reuters is seemingly making use of its' capabilities to index their video output as illustrated here, which you can try out on their video archive.

This is an important area of technology given how much information is buried in newsreels as well as increasingly in video clips, and which would take considerable human effort to properly index. More significantly, this service claims to operate in real-time. This type of service would ideally benefit from being combined with a) a speech recognition engine that could also capture transcribe the audio in order to make it indexable/searchable; and b) an alerting mechanism that could notify you if relevant people/terms had been found in videos or on live tv.