I wouldn’t say I’m cheap as much as I like not being under contract. At least that’s what I tell myself every time I’m talking myself out of running to my local Apple store and buying the new iPhone 4S.
I’d like a better camera, but I did just buy a DSLR, so that’s not really a good excuse. I’m not the most organized person in the world, so I really like the idea of having Siri remind me to do things later. That’s such a big draw for me that I’m really tempted by it. My wife is always saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a smart phone to remind you to do things?” She knows I have an iPhone 3Gs, but I just don’t like typing reminders to myself.
With this in mind, I started looking for ways to do this for less than buying a new phone.
First the bad news. Nothing is exactly like Siri. There are several ways to do parts of what “she” does, but nothing seems to do it all or do it as well. I’m not against jailbreaking my iPhone 3GS, but it seems that iOS 5 has made that more difficult than in the past, so I’m not going to try to get my phone to pretend to be an iPhone 4S so that I can get Siri (although it’s tempting).
It could be that you want one or two of Siri’s features, but don’t need the whole shebang.
Well, there’s good news for you.
Depending on what you want to do, you might be able to do that for very little money or even free. I’ll start with the free things.
1. Apple’s built-in solutions
Beginning with the iPhone 3Gs, Apple introduced a feature called “voice control.” If you only want to call someone, play audio, or ask your phone what time it is, this is the app for you. Just hold down the home button until the voice over screen comes on and say “play music” or “call Tina mobile” and it will do it. Nice and simple. Will it read your email or text messages to you? Nope.
To get your phone to read things to you (let’s say you’re in the car or have left your glasses somewhere and you can’t quite make out the text), you need to turn on a couple of accessibility options.
Go to Settings>General>Accessbility.
Make sure VoiceOver is off and turn Speak Selection on. Now go to the bottom of the screen and set Triple-click Home to ToggleVoiceOver.
Press the home button and now you can do a couple of things that you couldn’t before. Let’s say you can tell you’ve got a text message, but can’t read it for one reason or another.
Press and hold on the message like you’re going to copy it, but you should have another choice to the right of copy called Speak. If you’re driving or can’t make it out, just tap on the right side of the bubble.
If you don’t want to look at the phone at all (even out of the corner of your eye), triple-click the home button. It might take a couple of tries to get it to work, but you’ll hear “VoiceOver on” when you’ve got it. Now, wherever you tap, it will speak what’s there including App names.
To start an app, you need to double-tap it, since a single tap just reads what’s tapped. It will also read Tweets (in the Twitter app), emails, and text messages. Triple tap to turn it off because it’s gets annoying hearing things like “Screen dimmed” and “Screen locked.”
2. Orchestra
If you want to created a to do list for yourself, Orchestra is the app for that. It’s voice enabled so you can either speak or type text to do it. It integrates with the Orchestra web app which can also make to do items for people in various groups.
It’s free, but limited in that it only prioritizes items by when they’re due and that’s limited to whole days. “Remind me to check the laundry in an hour,” gives you an item that says “Remind me to check the laundry in an hour.”
That’s somewhat helpful, but not what I wanted.
3. Dragon Dictation and Dragon Go!
If you know anything about voice recognition, you know that Nuance is the company that does it best. That’s why I was really excited when I found these apps. The problem isn’t voice recognition, but what the apps do with it when they’ve got it. Dragon dictation can text, email, or do social media updates, but you have to type the recipient’s name because it only turns your voice into text; it doesn’t respond to commands, too.
Dragon Go! is better, but still limited. It takes the text you dictate and sends it to one of several apps. I could say, “Play Buck Rogers on Netflix” and it would do that (assuming I had Netflix installed and had an active subscription), but searching Churchm.ag for this reference wouldn’t work.
4. Vlingo
This is about as close as you’re going to get to Siri for free. It lacks two things that I really want from an app like this.
First, it doesn’t set alarms or reminders. Secondly, it doesn’t read what you’ve written back to you.
That said, it does do Google searches, send text messages, emails, and social media updates using your voice. This is pretty cool. There aren’t any limitations as to how often you can use it; it just doesn’t do everything that I want it to.
5. Pannous Voice Actions
This is the best Siri competitor that I could find for the iPhone. It does have four downsides, though.
First, it costs (as of last night) $4.99 and there’s no free version to even try.
Second, there’s some disagreement as to how well it works. It took me two weeks to buy it because half the reviews say it doesn’t work and half say it works great. My experience is that it works great, but I have a midwestern American accent, so that could be why it’s great for me, but not for others. It might be worth trying if you don’t have a strong accent, but if American English is a second language to you, it might not work.
Thirdly, the reminders (which work like you’d expect them to) come up as notifications, but don’t ring any sort of alarm. If the reminder is time sensitive, this might be a problem. Since it adds reminders to your calendar, you can turn on an alarm for each reminder, but I’d rather check a box to make that the default behavior. They say that will be fixed with the next release, but as of now it’s still lacking.
Finally, there’s a limit of 300 requests. I’m told that uninstalling and reinstalling resets the count, but this is really disappointing in a paid app.
Other apps
I tested a lot more than these apps, but was really disappointed in the results of the others. There are a lot of “reminder apps” that talk about using your voice, but they merely play a recording of your voice at a time you have to set manually. One app claims to be better than Siri because it “knows what you want before you ask it.” In practice, that means that you set it up to read email, twitter, or a few other things and it does it when you tap on that item. I’m really disappointed in that one because it was a pay app.
Conclusion
So, is there a way to get Siri-like functions without upgrading to an iPhone 4S or jailbreaking?
It depends what you want to do.
There’s no replacement that I can find that does what Siri does without limitions and nothing that operates system wide. I guess I’ll just see how Voice Actions does long-term and break down and buy an iPhone 4s if it doesn’t cut it.
If there are other apps you’ve found, let me know of any that work better than these.
[Image via MJ/TR (´・ω・)]
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