Ok, so I may be a little overenthusiastic here, but I am in lurve! Over here in California, they just brought out a new law regarding mobile phone use in cars. You now have to be “hands free,” which means some kind of Bluetooth hookup.

Now, you can either go to a pro and get a hands free kit installed in your car properly or you can have a Bluetooth hookup with a silly cockroach in the ear thing. I opted for the cockroach.  So, with that in mind, and my spanking new Centro, I decided to play around with Nuance Voice Control which is a specific application for PalmOS units. And it does the most wonderful things.

You have 2 options, you can either take the 30 day trial, or you can opt to purchase the application for $6 a month. I chose the 30 day trial because I’m looking at the pros and cons of a cockroach vs an in-car Bluetooth installation.

Getting Started

The first thing you need to do, is follow the instructions for download. You can either download it directly from your device, or enter an email address that you use on your unit and it can be sent there. It takes less than a minute to install. Just a word of warning – installation takes a LOT of battery power!

Once downloaded, you then look for the icon on the main control panel, and it will take you to a registration setup. If you are doing the trial, you just need to enter your phone number, but if you’ve opted to purchase you need to enter your registration code.

Commands

The commands are easy! I was worried at first, because it’s directed at an American market and with my English broad Norf Yorksher accent I wasn’t sure if it would “understand me”.  It doesn’t if I speak in my natural accent and inflections, however, I don’t speak like that in real life so I used my “normal” voice that I use every day at work and it understood me perfectly.

Nuance’s website gives you a list of commands to use, and in testing, every single one of them worked which was a pleasant surprise. And it’s easy to use! Upon download, it automatically maps to the side button on your Palm, so you just hit the button, say the command and release the button. It then does what you asked it to. The automatic mapping may be a problem if you already have something mapped to the side button, and the program doesn’t allow for customization.

The “call” command and “dial” command are straightforward. You can send a text message to someone, although the downside of that is that you still have to hit send so it’s not ideal when driving. The same goes for email (more about email coming up). On the plus side, the speech recognition for text/email is awesome! It got the correct words every time I tried it with a couple of exceptions.

The email command was great, and works excellently with whichever is your default email address. If you have more than one email address, however, you cannot choose which email address to use. In addition, you can only send short messages – no more than 20 words – so the text syntax would be a better option.

One thing that comes with the application is a built in profanity filter. Naturally, the puerile side of me had to try it out It works very, very well on the most common swear words, to the extent that a message will pop up saying the profanity filter does not allow that particular word. However, you can spell the word out and it will be accepted. Believe me, my friends and I had fun with this one!

You can ask for directions, but sadly they were only accurate about 60% of the time. It comes in through Google Maps, but I found you would get directions to the same street in a different city.

As I don’t have any music on my Centro, I figured the command for playing a song wouldn’t work and I was right, but judging by the excellent way everything else is recognized I will make the assumption that it works just as well.

The applications ability to add an appointment to the calendar was frustrating.  I found myself having to repeat it 3 or 4 times using variations of syntax, but although it got the times correct it was hit or miss on the dates.

Conclusion

On the whole, it’s a brilliant application with but a few frustrations and I would highly recommend it.

What I liked:

The speech recognition, even with my odd accent

The ability to “voice” a text message or short email

The ease of download and installation

The profanity filter

The website instructions

What I didn’t like:

Doesn’t work through a Bluetooth headset

The calendar commands, too frustrating

The profanity filter

Vital Stats

A link to download comes pre-loaded on the Sprint Centro, or you can get Nuance Voice Control from their site. Nuance is also available for Windows Mobile and BlackBerry. The subscription is $6 a month.