Sensory Inc., a company that develops speech recognition software for electronics, has released its free VoiceDial app for Android smartphones and tablets, enabling users to make calls to contacts by voice without touching their device.
The app uses Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree technology to listen for a trigger phrase that awakens the phone or tablet, and TrulyNatural to learn from the contact list and recognize names and numbers. The company has done this sort of thing before, most notably with the Moto X, where saying a specific phrase, like “Hey, Moto X” will wake up the phone and cause it to await further auditory calling instructions.
As in that case, saying “Hey, Blue Genie, call John Doe” will both awaken the device and initiate the call at the same time. Sensory says the speech recognition is speaker-independent and requires no training, so it should be able to process contact lists, big or small, in a very short time. And because it’s built-in, it doesn’t use the cloud in any way, negating the need to even have a data connection to work, much less the need to send anything to a cloud provider.
The app will also work when a phone is paired with a Bluetooth headset or speaker, and includes an option to automatically launch when it senses that the user is in a moving vehicle. Sensory adds that the recognition is so distinct that it will work in noisier environments, outperforming some of the built-in voice dialers some Android phones have (though they never mentioned the Moto X).
There will be a reported expansion to the app that will add hands-free voice control of music, navigation mapping, and calendar functions, among others.
The app currently operates only in U.S. English, and appears to only be available in the U.S. as well. New languages for European and Asian do seem to be countries in the works, with release dates set for later this year. Sensory didn’t disclose which other languages it was working to release first.
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