One of the primary objectives of mobile speech apps makers ought to be making the user experience as eyes-forward-and-hands-free as possible. While I haven’t had a chance to use it, I was very pleased to see the announcement of a new service from Vlingo called SafeReader. In essence, version 4.5 of the Vlingo app for Blackberry will recognize the spoken instruction “SafeReader On!” (exclamation point optional) and will respond with spoken renderings of incoming text (SMS) or email messages.

The Vlingo application on iPhones, as well as Blackberries, already support spoken origination of SMS, email and status updates for Facebook or Twitter. In my experience, it has been very good at distinguishing between commands (such as “Email Ted Stevens…” or “make an appointment”) and content, thus minimizing the need to do a lot of screen poking. In its marketing literature, Vlingo calls “the reverse functionality”, and sees it as a means to accomplishing the tasks that involve rendering written words as speech.

Vlingo’s Dave Grannan has long made it clear that the company doesn’t endorse the use of mobile devices while driving. Therefore they consider this a safe, hands-free way to retrieve “must-have” messages.

Categories: Articles

Tags: RIM, mobile speech, Vlingo