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A few weeks ago I told you guys about a hands-free, voice-to-text app in the Android Market — Sonalight Text by Voice. This is the only app I’ve found that allows for true, hands-free SMS messaging while also speaking your incoming SMS (and Google Voice) messages. Naturally, this is most useful while driving and when your hands need to stay on the wheel and eyes on the road.
While I had nothing but praise for the Text by Voice app, some users in the Android Market weren’t too happy with the 20 free messages Sonalight provided and the developers have recently upped the count of free messages to… UNLIMITED. That’s right. You can now get the full experience of Text by Voice for as long as the developers decide to keep it free. Also added were bug fixes and a few new enhancements like a voice indicator and better recognition.
Not sure how long Sonalight will keep this free thing going, but lets hope it’s long enough to hook potential users who might have been wary of the previous messaging limit. You can download Sonalight Text by Voice for free (with unlimited messaging) right now in the Android Market.
Cool! time to try it out, have been looking for an app like this
One of my personal faves =)
Is this better than the speaktoit app?
Since this only does sms, I would say no, just for that limitation. It wasn’t designed to be a speaktoit or Iris or Siri clone; it does one thing and does it pretty well. Turn it on, it runs in the background, and no matter what sms client you use, stock, go, adw-it works with them all. The voice is robotic but very understandable and didn’t seem to stumble over any words (even the mor colorful ones my friends like to use).
The interface is basic, almost boring, but again you won’t be looking at it much, esp if you have it running in the background.
My two problems are one it is a bit of a battery hog. If you have a long commute I’d definitely keep it on a car charger. I was playing with it at home and it went from about 85% to 65% in the space of an hour.
The second is the voice recognition, it wasn’t very accurate. I first tried it without my dentures, and it was about 50/50 (vlingo on the other hand, was far more accurate), when I put my teeth in, it went up to about 75%. I’ve never had anyone have a problem understanding me, or other programs make as many errors, so I think that needs to be tweaked a bit.
The biggest plus is it is totally hands free, the texts are read as they come in, as instantaneously as you could want, and it can be moved to the SD card.
I used it on my pos Optimus V and it ran well. If you want more than texting though, stick with vlingo or speaktoit (vlingo is my preference).
I got the app and it seems to work precisely the way it is supposed to. My biggest complaint is that it does not work via the bluetooth in my car, It’s still listening through my phone mic, and I do not hear the audio cues in either my phone or my car speakers.