A quick rundown of its features:

Web search. Google’s app, you will not be stunned to learn, only lets you search Google. Vlingo lets you search both Yahoo and Google. (Yahoo is the default, but it’s easy to switch between engines on the fly.)

Voice dialing. You can speak the name of a contact to dial his or her number, a feature that lots of folks wish the iPhone had built in. Google doesn’t do this.

Maps. You can search the iPhone’s Maps app from Vlingo to locate businesses (classic example: pizza).

Social networks. You can update Twitter and Facebook statuses by talking. Google doesn’t do this.

Google Mobile App’s signature feature is the ingenious (if apparently questionable) way it notices that you’ve lifted the phone to your ear and accepts voice input automatically once you have. Vlingo doesn’t do that–you need to press down an on-screen button while you speak. It’s less entertaining, but works reasonably well. (I do wish there was more real estate between this jumbo-sized “Press + Speak” button and the smaller ones below it for jumping between features–I occasionally jumped between modes by accident.)

How’s the quality of the voice recognition? In my completely unscientific tests, not quite as good as Google’s–the main problem I encountered was that Vlingo sometimes added an extra syllable or two which I hadn’t actually spoken to the start of my input. But it’s not bad, and it might get better with practice. And Vlingo, unlike Google, sometimes shows you several possibilities to choose from when it’s not sure if it understood you correctly.

Neither Vlingo nor Google does well at all with proper names. Here’s what I got when I tried to search for “Robert Scoble.”

A few other Vlingo quibbles:

It doesn’t use GPS to determine your location. If you don’t speak a location for your map searches, they take place wherever the iPhone’s Maps app happens to be at the moment. (Google knows where you are and uses that information to speed searches.)

It doesn’t have Google’s other local search features. Such as the ability to get movie times and weather.

It doesn’t auto-capitalize or punctuate your social network status updates. unless you speak punctuation marks your updates will look like they were written by ee cummings

Both Vlingo and Google Mobile App suffer from one usability gotcha that only Apple could fix: They launch Safari and Maps in some cases, and while it’s easy for an iPhone app to send you to another application, there’s no smooth way to get back to the original app without relaunching it. The iPhone could definitely use a “return to first app” feature of some sort.

And ultimately, voice input would be much cooler if it were simply built into the iPhone and available everywhere, rather than something you need to launch a specific app for. What if the on-screen keyboard had its own “Press and Speak” button which you could use wherever you’d otherwise tap? I have no idea whether that idea intrigues Apple as much as it does me, but the fact that the company hasn’t gotten around to doing even voice dialing yet may not be a good sign.

Ultimately, I don’t think I’m going to be a regular user of voice input in either Vlingo or Google Mobile App. (I haven’t launched the Google program once since I wrote about it.) I’m comfortable enough as an iPhone typist (tappist?) that voice isn’t a clear time-saver for me. But one of the best things about both apps is this: They’re free, so trying them out is painless. Fun, actually–whether or not you stick with them for the long haul.

Herewith, a few more Vlingo screens…

Share/E-Mail

Google really wants you to try the voice features: The first time you launch the new version of the app, you get a cutey-cute animated intro explaining how voice search works, and an invitation to watch a training video…

Voice search is indeed simple–you hold the phone up to your ear, wait for a beep, then say your search query. The Mobile App chugs away, for as little as a couple of seconds and as long as twenty seconds or so in my tests…

…and then delivers results for your search.

That’s assuming, of course, that it figures out what you said–the first time I said “Hotel Lucerne New York,” I got this:

And occasionally, the app just throws up its hands, figuratively speaking:

Overall, Mobile App’s success rate was good enough to impress me: It understood me close to ninety percent of the time. And when it didn’t, it was generally with searches that involved names of people or products that aren’t household names. (It pains me to report that I couldn’t get it to understand “Technologizer.” Lord knows I tried…)

Voice Search is at its most obviously useful when it combines your spoken query with its knowledge of your location–thanks to GPS in the case of the iPhone 3G–to give you local results. I happen to be blogging from Cambridge today:

In the end, Google Mobile App’s Voice Search is about one thing: saving you the effort of tapping out queries on the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard. Typing isn’t that hard, and Mobile App doesn’t even necessarily save you time, since it can take a while to parse your vocal input, and you don’t know if the app heard you correctly until it starts to return search results. But it’s nice to have options, and the voice feature does what it does well: Until voice recognition reaches 100% accuracy, it’s hard to imagine anyone executing it much better than Google has.

Voice search will undoubtedly become Google Mobile App’s signature feature. But the program does other stuff, too: You can search by typing if you prefer, and there are convenient links to such Web-based Google services as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader. If you use Google and you’ve got an iPhone, you need to give this free program a try. And if you do, let me know what you think…

Share/E-Mail