[Captivate Themes and Apps] ewingr:
I recently purchased Choice Dialer, and thought I'd start a thread with somewhat af a review, and hopefully learn from others too about how to make it work well for us.

Ever since moving to Android, I have sorely missed Microsoft Voice Command. Choice Dialer is a start toward that direction. Of course, some will think of Vlingo, which in fact may be better now than when I last used it. Seems there is not one voice app that does everything.

Among features that it has are;

Of course, Dial by name, or number

Play/pause music; Next/Previous song; Play by artist; Play from album; Play songs by title

Send email

Send text

Set Facebook status

Create contact

Open App

Schedule an event on calendar

Enable/Disable WiFi, Blue Tooth, GPS and some more

Tell you the time

Add to calendar

I have only had the app for a few days, and this review will not be comprehensive.

Does it understand?

I am struggleing a bit having it understand me. I frequently have it say "Try again". Sometimes it does something completely different from what I asked.

I am finding that it has a learning curve for speaking so it understands, as it is getting a little better. Interestingly, it understands better if I speak faster. When talking to a voice recognition, I think people have a tendency to speak slow and enunciate clearly. Interestingly, i find that makes it worse...at least, speaking slow does, for me.

I also think the app needs to mature some. For example I had this conversation with it yesterday:

Me: Enable Blue Tooth

CD: Did you say Disable Blue Tooth?

Me: No

CD; Disabling Blue Tooth.

Uh...it should have understood NO.

Another thing, as all voice dialers need, it needs a fairly quite environment. Background noise, radios, etc. will really throw it off.

Playing Music

First off, the only music player it plays through at the moment is the native android music app. I use MixZing, so prefer that.

It is nice that it will play by Artist, Album, or Song. But a glaring omission is it will not play by Genre. I asked them about playing genres, and got this response:

Dialng

I find it to do fairly well at dialing when the person is in the contacts. Occasionally need to retry. I really like that it has voice confirmation.

Send Email

When I go to dictate an email, it uses Google Voice to hear the message. And often I get "Server problem Speak again" message in the Google App. I suppose it is a problem for the Google App, not Choice Dialer. But in the end, not too great. I attempted an email 7 times, and it worked twice. When it works, there is no way that I know of to have it use punctuation.

Open App

I can say Open <program name> and it works fairly well.

An interesting challenge for it is this one: "Open GPS Test". It never gets that. I presume because GPS is not a word.

Enable/Disable Functions

It works pretty good to enable Blue Tooth, and WiFi. Again, I sometimes need to repeat.

But, interestingly, enabling GPS is not what you expect. It launches the settings for you to click it, rather than just turning it on. I contacted them about it, and this is their response:

That one perplexes me. If you can directly enable Wifi, and Blue Tooth, I wonder why you couldn't do GPS. Certainly, there are apps that you can toggle it with.

Support

I find them VERY responsive. This is a good sign, and hopefully the app will mature and improve.

Wish List

If only this, or some app somewhere, could be as solid and capable as I found Microsoft Voice Command to be.

Would like to be able to : Play music by genre; Of course, have improved understanding and accuracy; tell me what is on my schedule today, and tomorrow. I'm sure there are others, but I'm running out of time for now on this post.

Conclusion

I may continue to use this for basic stuff, including dialing, and turning on BT when in car, opening apps etc. But for now, its too much effort repeating and so forth for the other features to be of much value to me.

So, are you using Choice Dialer? Better luck with it? Suggestions for use?