Yummy Applications (For Your Mouth!)

These two applications are so yummy, they taste like Christmas.

If you are a faithful reader, you might remember that we predicted the iPhone would soon have applications which would offer voice control for dialing contacts and more... well, that day has come.

Currently, there are a number of applications available at the iTunes store which promise varying degrees of voice control. Most of them don't work. But, there are a couple that do work and they will rock your socks.

Say Who! is a free program which allows you to say any name in your contact list and it will automatically (or not if you choose) dial that number. You can also just say a number, and it will dial that! On top of that, you can add words to the "nickname" column in contacts and Say Who! will recognize those names. It takes a moment for this puppy to load the first time you use it (like 7 seconds) but after that, it works quickly and is very accurate. As an added bonus, if you turn off the phone while you are in the application, the next time you turn on the phone, you don't have to wait 7 seconds to start speaking, your iPhone will still be ready to accept your voice commands.

Say Where! is also free and we think it's even yummier. This app, made by the same geniuses that gave us Say Who!, allows you to search for addresses with only your voice, anywhere in the world (or maybe just America--the testers in our Danish office are still sleeping, so we can't yet verify world-wide addresses...) If you have the 3G iPhone (and you should by now!) it will also use the GPS chip to nail down your location before finding the address you requested and opening it up in Google Maps. By default, it opens Google maps with directions from your current location to your spoken address. On top of all that vocal goodness, Say Where! features a couple of other types of searches. Using only your voice, you can search "Yelp" "Yellow Pages" "Traffic.com" and best of all, "Google Maps for Business." With a Google Maps for business search, you can speak, "Apple Store" into your iPhone and Google maps will open up and show you pins for all the nearby Apple Stores. Because it's Google, you can say almost anything associated with a business... like "Dentist" and Google Maps will open and display pins for nearby dentists. If we could wrap this up in paper and give it as a gift, we would!

To make this announcement even juicer, it has just come to our attention that Google has announced a new iPhone application called "voice search" which is set to hit the iPhone store today! (yes, today!) This bad-boy will let you search for anything on Google with only your voice. Amazing. It's a brave new world, people. And we're not afraid to say it!