Melodis Voice Dialer Review

This is my first review of the 3rd party iPhone apps I currently use and it's for Melodis Voice Dialer.

Melodis Dialer allows you to voice dial based on spoken input through the iPhone's built-in microphone. Of the many voice dialers out there, I found that Melodis Voice Dialer is not only fast, but accurate.

Why a voice dialer? I think it's pretty obvious for those who make calls on the road. We want to keep our eyes on the road and the iPhone's Address Book or Phone interface is primarily a touch interface and doesn't allow you to find a contact within your address book to dial quickly and relatively hands-free. That's where voice dialers come in.

Historically speaking, voice dialing has primarily been a function of the phone or some type of carrier-side technology. Typically you have to record your voice speaking a contact's name. When voice dialing you say the person's name you want to dial in the same manner as it was recorded. The phone or the carrier compares your voice input and compares that against the stored recording of all your contact names and does a best attempt at matching.

Because there is no such built-in functionality for the iPhone or any carriers selling the iPhone, developers have to come up with some ingenious ways to do voice dialing. All the voice dialers that I've seen and tried for the iPhone have done some form of the following:

1. You speak the contact name that you want to dial.
2. That voice recording is stored as an audio file and sent to the vendor's server.
3. That server converts the audio to text via speech to text.
4. That text is sent back to the iPhone and a comparison is made against your Address Book contacts and a best-guess is made.

To use Melodis Voice Dialer, you press and hold against an on-screen button while speaking the contact name you want to call. If the contact you want to call has more than one number, such as work number, home number, mobile number, etc., you can also speak "home", "mobile" or "work" to specify that type of number.

If there are multiple possible results from the comparison, you will be displayed the potential matches and allow you to pick the appropriate contact and an appropriate number in cases where the contact has more than one number.

Again, I found that Melodis Voice Dialer had the fastest response out of all the voice dialers I tested, usually within a few seconds. Granted YMMV depending if your iPhone is connected via 3G, EDGE, or wi-fi....and best of all, it's free!

UPDATE:

One feature I failed to mention that I should have is the ability to do more than just dial the contact. After performing a lookup of a contact, it allows you to also SMS or e-mail them (if the contact has such information). By selecting the SMS option on the contact, it will open up the iPhone SMS app with that contact info. By selecting the contact's e-mail address, it will open up the iPhone's native Mail app. Note that in both cases that Melodis Dialer, SMS, nor Mail will perform voice-to-text dictation.