Voice applications for Palm’s Treo
About a year ago, I purchased a Palm Treo 650 with the hope that the device would not only combine my cell phone, calendar, contact list and email inbox into a single device, but that it would allow these elements to interact in ways not possible with separate devices.
I haven’t been disappointed.
In particular, I like the way I can search through my entire list of contacts to find and dial the person I’d like to call. I also like the way that the Treo uses the phone number of an incoming call to look up and display the name of the contact who is calling, enabling me to decide which calls to answer and which calls to send to voicemail.
The Treo 650 uses the Palm operating system. Relative to what I’ve seen and read about with regard to Windows-based Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), the Palm operating system is much simpler to use and requires fewer stylus taps to accomplish the same tasks.
The other great benefit of the Palm operating system is that a large number of applications have been developed by outside developers that further enhance the Treo’s usability. Three voice-based applications have been particularly useful for me. All three of them have improved my productivity, and two of them have also improved safety when I’m using the Treo in the car.
Voice Dial from VoiceSignal ($20) is the application that I use most often on the Treo. It enables me to call any of the hundreds of contacts in my Treo with simple English commands. By pressing a single button on the Treo (in my case, I’ve assigned one of the buttons on the side of the Treo), the application prompts me with “Say a command,” to which I can respond with a command such as “Call Bob Jones Mobile.” The accuracy of the application in recognizing the names in my contact list is extremely high. If Voice Dial is not sure about who I’m trying to call, it will read to me a menu of possible choices from which I can select by responding “yes” to the appropriate choice. You don’t have to train the application in any way; simply add the contact to your contacts list (via Outlook, Palm Desktop, etc.) and the application automatically adds the contact to its database. Voice Dial enables me to dial contacts more quickly than rooting through my contacts list and hitting the dial button and – as a great side benefit – also enables me to dial numbers more safely while I’m in the car.
The second useful application is called mVoice from MotionApps ($25). I often generate lots of great ideas while I’m driving and I’ve always needed a way of recording these ideas before forgetting them. In the old days, I had to take my eyes off of the road to find a pen and piece of paper to write down the ideas. With mVoice, I simply press and hold a single key (the green phone button in my case) and record my thoughts and ideas. With mVoice, my Treo has become a handy dictation device that’s with me at all times! You can also record phone conversations if you wish, and transfer any recorded files to your PC using mVoice’s conduit add-in.
The third voice-related application is VolumeCare Pro from GoTreo Software ($20). Cell phone volume levels have always driven me crazy. Perhaps 50% of the time with my old cell phones, I struggled to hear what the other party was trying to say. With VolumeCare, speaker volume can be boosted substantially, both on a default basis as well as on a call-by-call basis when I really need to boost volume beyond normal levels. This application boosts both productivity – because I’m not always asking the other party to repeat what they’re saying – as well as the “quality of interaction” for the person at the other end of the line who does not have to suffer through my requests to repeat what they just said. When I’m talking to customers using the Treo, this benefit translates into better customer service and happier customers.
I’ve given up my plain-old cell phone for good. Although a little larger than the standard cell phone and maybe not as stylish as some of the cell phones on the market today, the Treo trumps the cell phone in every other aspect. From a voice perspective alone, the Treo outshines the cell phone, providing me with a good boost in productivity and safety. Later on, I’ll review some other Treo applications that are not voice-related that further boost productivity.
You can order all of these applications from www.handango.com, a great site for finding, trialing and purchasing applications for the Treo and other PDA devices.