The Promptu System Corp’s latest free speech recognition app known as SoutOUT is now available on the Android Market, where it allows users to compose text messages in natural speech instead of letting their fingers do all the typing. Motorolad Droid owners will be able to check out this app over the Android Market. How fast is it able to detect the number of words spoken, and will it be able to handle non-native English speakers? Still, ShoutOUT bears some merit since at point of publishing, there are no other Android speech recognition app that can be used for text messaging, including Google Voice functionality in Android 2.1, which is able to hold a candle to ShoutOUT’s accuracy which has been fully integrated with the Android SMS client. Apart from that, it relies on Smartword, Promptu’s editing tool that allows users to see and select from likely word alternatives. Will this prove to be a hit of an app? Only time will tell, but something tells me that those who are way more used to typing out their text messages in a flurry of finger movements will prefer to stick to the keyboard. Of course, you might argue that sometimes you need to send a text message out urgently, and have both hands occupied. What can I say? If it is really that urgent and important, surely you will be able to pull over to the side of the road and make sure that you type it out within the fastest time possible with the least amount of chance for errors – after all, speaking when driving doesn’t exactly mean your focus on the road is still 100%, and should the speech recognition capability let you down during that moment, you might just send a well intentioned but wrong meaning along in the message. There are ways to go around this though, and in order to maximize accuracy for ShoutOUT,
a personalized acoustic model is assigned for every user during the app’s registration process. Guess this means other folks aren’t advised to use your Droid when speaking to compose a text message! ShoutOUT’s speech recognition is server-based, and 100% automated, where all message transcriptions that appear on users’ phones are created without any human intervention to ensure your privacy. Other features include Voice Addressing, full integration into the phone’s messaging service, message exchanges threaded by recipient, thumbnail images for contacts and one-touch navigation to all recent incoming and outgoing messages. So Voice to Text apps are still a fairly new concept that will streamline themselves as time goes on. This one is good to try if you are keen to the concept and don’t have other alternatives.
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