GuruJesse

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Homepage: http://www.repairlaunch.com/

Posts by GuruJesse

Google’s new Voice Actions for Android 2.2 (Froyo)

Aug 26th

What was already a very useful app has now become even more useful. Google has updated Android’s voice search app to include support for regular phone tasks. Now, with just the touch of a microphone icon, you can tell your phone to call someone, text someone, email someone, play music, navigate you somewhere, write you a note, browse the web, and much more.

Where I find the most use out of this feature is in text messaging. Let’s face it, while driving; it’s pretty much impossible to text anymore, not to mention unsafe and increasingly illegal. I used to be a pro at it, but now with physical keyboards falling by the wayside, there needs to be a new solution aside from actually calling people (Who likes calling people anyway?). Google’s new voice actions are by far the best solution I have ever come across. Vlingo offers a similar service, but without as many actions, and with, in my opinion, inferior voice-recognition ability.

To send someone a text, you simply touch the microphone button on the Google search bar, or on your home screen (if you placed it there) and say “text [recipient name] [message]”. For example, I would say “Text Jimmy Smith, Do you want to play racquetball tonight?” Then a box comes up with the message, and after confirming the recipient and the message, you can just press send. Now you have successfully sent a text message while only touching your phone twice. Pretty cool, right? It gets cooler!

Say you feel like listening to some Pearl Jam. Press the microphone button and say “Listen to Pearl Jam”. Now a box will pop up asking you which application you’d like to use. I typically use Pandora, so I selected it as my default music program for Google voice actions. Now when I say “Listen to Pearl Jam”, Pandora opens and starts the Pearl Jam channel immediately. You can use this to play music stored on your device as well. It also supports last.fm, Slacker, and Rdio in addition to Pandora.

I did run into one problem with voice actions. When I first started using it, it failed to recognize names in my contacts list. After doing a little research, I found that others were having the same problem, and that it was easily remedied by backing up your contacts to gmail, completely erasing your contacts on your phone, then resyncing the contacts from gmail. After doing that, the contact recognition worked like a champ.

Using voice commands on your phone in public still feels very awkward to me, and as a result, I mainly use this feature in the privacy of my own home or car. However, I do feel that this technology holds a firm place in the future of smartphones. Someday we will all be walking around talking to our phones like it is second nature.

Voice search for Android is available for all Android phones, but the newest version, with the actions I talked about and more, is only available for Android 2.2 (Froyo). You can find out more about Google’s voice actions, including a list of all the actions you can utilize at Voice Actions.

Jesse is editor for iPhone repair techs at iFixyouri.

Google Takes Back the App With New HTML5-Powered Mobile YouTube

Jul 14th

Posted by GuruJesse in Apple

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The mobile world got a whole lot better a week ago when it was announced YouTube revamped its mobile experience in an attempt to make it closer to the desktop (waste time at work) experience.

YouTube was reworked by designers primarily in HTML5, which is highly favorable to Apple and iPhone users, who have longed for such a day. It does not appear this was a move to make Steve Jobs happy, rather just good business for the mobile phone world. Google gobbled up YouTube in 2006 and since then viewership has increased steadily, but the company recognizes the importance of mobile viewership for the continued growth of the platform. My thinking is that they want YouTube to be on the uptick. To do this the devices that incorporate YouTube need to be of high quality and the experience needs to be an accurate depicton of what is seen behind at a desktop.

To show how the new setup was vastly superior to the old Apple app, YouTube did a comparitive demonstration, where it clearly performed better in terms of video quality and user experience. You can shift from low-to-high quality video, search for videos and navigate within them. With the YT App now obsolete, the site is basically operating like an app but brings better 3G video quality and faster steaming. This is just another successful attempt to control the iPhone App world.

Recent history confirms this, as the situation mimics the Google Voice controversy, when Apple yanked the needed app most likely because of AT&T. Google went on to release a web based mobile version (m.google.com/voice).

This is an attack by Google to control (or eliminate) the iPhone App game. Who would want to go through an approval process when web based Apps can be viewed by any mobile device?

This changes the game for developers and users alike. You have to wonder if the iPhone App world will survive as we know it for awhile simply because it is what people are used to, kind of like your grandma still reading the newspaper.