No matter how great your keyboard skills, stylus tapping dexterity, or touch screen wizardry, it is still often a whole bunch easier and more natural to speak a short command to your mobile device.  I can say ‘rodeo in Dallas, Texas’ much faster than I can type that on any keyboard.

Anything that pushes voice control forward and makes it accessible in more applications, is a good thing in my book. Vlingo is a voice-powered interface for mobile phones / mobile devices, that’s being launched today by Vlingo Corporation.

Vlingo is referred to as a  voice user interface ‘plugin’, which will allow carriers and application publishers to add voice enabled controls very quickly and inexpensively.

Here are some of the highlights of what vlingo aims to bring to the table in the voice control arena:

* No Limits on What You Can Say – No need to change how you speak or memorize a list of commands – say what you want, how you want, and vlingo delivers the results
* The Most accurate system on the market
* The ability to freely mix typing and talking
* * Simple API for application integration – lightweight library, can run on the majority of 3G and multi-media enabled phones to allow easy integration into a wide range of applications 
* Allows carriers and application providers to quickly and inexpensively voice-enable any application – allows them to integrate speech into any existing app with ease and at low cost

User Experience

I’ve had a chance to play around with a couple of the vlingo beta / demo applications, and have been very impressed! It has proved to be extremely accurate in picking up whatever I say to it, even when hitting it with not-so-commonly-used words, like ‘Montessori School’. It got almost everything right first time when speaking general business and address search terms to it, as well as when searching for music by artist or song title. It even did pretty well in a car on a freeway and in a crowded office reception area, with a fair level of background noise.

Company Background and Some Technical Details:

Here’s more background from the vlingo press information and some details on their technology:

Founded by industry-pioneering speech scientist Mike Phillips (a co-founder of SpeechWorks, now Nuance, NASDAQ: NUAN) and John Nguyen, and funded by Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners, vlingo was created specifically to leverage these latest technical advancements in the mobile market. In April, the company recruited mobile industry veteran Dave Grannan, most recently a general manager at Nokia (NYSE: NOK), the world’s largest mobile phone company, as CEO.

“Consumers haven’t completely embraced mobile data services yet for one simple reason – they’re being held hostage by 12 tiny keys,” said Grannan. “Vlingo removes this obstacle of the past by giving consumers control over their phones with the power of speech. By opening up the potential for these mobile data services, vlingo gives carriers and mobile application providers a quantum leap in usability and the corresponding revenue opportunities with the only voice user interface ‘plug in’ on the market.”

Leveraging a new technology called adaptive Hierarchical Language Models (HLMs), vlingo’s one-of-a-kind approach allows carriers and mobile application providers to quickly and inexpensively voice-enable any application – without custom engineering or in-house speech expertise. Unlike conventional voice recognition technologies that require individual purpose-built applications and rely on constrained grammars and scripted interactions, vlingo’s open approach eliminates a traditionally costly and intensive manual effort. This advancement allows mobile application providers and carriers to integrate speech into any existing application with ease and at a low cost. As a result, consumers get quick, easy and accurate access to mobile applications, which translates into new revenue streams.

Initially vlingo will focus on cellphones that do not have QWERTY keyboards, but in future it will extend to Windows Mobile and other leading mobile platforms.

The longer term vision is for vlingo to provide a consistent user interface experience across a broad range of applications. So users can recognize a vlingo-enabled textbox and think “I know how to use that” – rather than trying to master all sorts of different voice control methods for different programs.

You can see a demo of vlingo at: http://www.vlingomobile.com/prelaunch/demo.html

You can also visit www.vlingomobile.com and use the download link (if you have the right phone model – Sprint only for now) to check vlingo out for yourself.

It will be interesting to see how vlingo develops and gets adopted – it certainly looks to have an impressive foundation and looks very promising.