Now you can talk to your phone and it understands you. no seriously blackberry’s can now listen =D

Vlingo the innovator in voice recognition for the Yahoo Mobile Onesearch has recently launched a new beta giving BlackBerry smart phone users control over mobile information and tasks with the power of their voice. Vlingo is currently a free download and available on the BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, & 88xx series.

Bottom line you can send a friend a text message without typing. Just speak, verify and send. Basically your phone figures out what you want, finds it and shows you how to get there. No tapping, no thumbs, just good old speaking which is suitable to avoid the no text/driving laws.

Furthermore here is what Vlingo can do…

• Send and reply to emails and text messages
• Search the Web
• Dial the phone
• Look up contacts
• Send a “note to self”
• Voice updates to Facebook & Twitter status updates
• Tell A Friend
• Read-back of the full text or email message that was spoken
• The ability to launch built in programs:
  • Address Book
  • Alarm
  • BrickBreaker
  • Calculator
  • Calendar
  • Camera
  • Maps
  • Media
  • MemoPad
  • Messages
  • Options
  • Tasks
• The ability to launch third party programs:
  • Facebook
  • Google Maps
  • Opera
  • Viigo

Over the next few quarters we are looking to see added support for Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Palm devices over time, on separate schedules.

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Face Recognition of Photos in Google Picasa 3

This Tuesday Google is set to launch facial recognition in it’s photo managment software according to cnet (here).

Why is this important? Firstly Picasa (here) is still the best photo managment desktop software on the market (and it’s free). I’ve been using it for a few years, have tried all the competitor products and it wins hands down every time. Note: It’s not as social as Flickr – so I use them both.

Picasa3 will find and sort all the photos of the same person.

Facial recognition: I have about 18,000 digital photos sitting on my drive at home. Picasa handles them all nicely – but sorting, tagging etc is a nightmare. Finding a photo of someone is a manual process – this will hopefully correct that. The idea – tag one photo of a person and Picasa will do the rest. It’s apparently not perfect – but this will be a huge jump for Picasa.

http://picasa.google.com/

“Barack-Rolling”.. and the Google Elections Video Gadget

Most of you internet pranksters (and victims) out there will be familiar with the bait-and-switch concept of “Rick-Rolling“.

Hugh Atkin, a Sydney local, has posted on his blog – an appropriation of this concept, using footage from Barack Obama’s U.S. Presidential Campaign.

The result is the “Barack-Roll”:

Video’s like this are popping up around the place, making use of Google’s new “Elections Video Search” gadget.

The gadget makes use of speech-to-text technology and allows you to search for a word or sentence – and if one of the featured Politicians has said those words in one of the countless videos on file – it lists them for you and highlights at what point in the video the relevant text is spoken.

Whilst the speech-to-text technology for the gadget is by no means perfect, it definitely does the trick for sourcing the goods for little meme’s like this one.