Hack 30. Dial with Your Voice
Use your voice instead of your fingers to dial your Treo. This can be useful if your hands are occupied. You might not see the need for voice dialing until you've tried to dial a contact while driving. Even if you're very familiar with navigating your contacts single-handedly, you still have to glance at the keypad from time to time. With voice dialing, it becomes much easier and safer to perform this task. Most cell phones come with some kind of voice dialing system as a standard feature, and most generally follow the same sequence to dial a contact:
Strangely, however, neither the Treo 600 nor the Treo 650 comes with built-in voice dialing, despite this feature being one of the top customer requests. You do have options, though none are free. Table 5-1 shows a breakdown of the most popular voice dialing options. Figure 5-6. Palm's Treo Voice Dialing is listening for your voiceFigure 5-7. Treo Voice Dialing verifies its match on-screen
Here's the bottom line for voice dialing on your Treo. If you have a Treo 650, you are best off with Treo Voice Dialing, which Palm.com distributes for VoiceSignal. It has received very good reviews, and no training is required, meaning you don't have to record yourself saying all of your contacts' names. Rather, the software is sophisticated enough to figure out what you're saying. The only flaw is that it is not compatible with GoodLink. If you have a Treo 600 like I do, or you have a Treo 650 and GoodLink, then Voice Dialer is your best bet. While it does require you to record yourself saying each of your contacts' names that you wish to voice-dial, once you get it set up, it works very well and you'll wonder how you lived without it. I wouldn't waste money on Sprint PCS Voice Command. Though it does work for all the phones under one Sprint plan, it's still $5 a month until the end of timewhich is certainly more expensive than a one-time payment to buy the registration key for the other two options. Also, if you are roaming, you won't have access to voice commands, which is the deal-breaker for me. Jeff Ishaq |