Things are happening really fast here at VoiZapp as we hit our stride at turning out requested updates to our existing apps and building new ones. Friends Aloud 3.0 was approved in record time by Apple, and has been for sale in the App Store for about a week. Even at the higher price of $2.99, sales have surpassed expectations, and reviews are great as usual. 

We also completed giving Tweets Aloud 3.0 similar Siri-like tweet dictation capabilities, and have now submitted it to the App Store for approval. Hopefully, that will be forthcoming this week, so that you will be able to not only listen to but also dictate your tweets from now on, resulting in a totally hands-free Twitter experience.

Next up will be Read It Aloud, a completely new app that will let you read aloud your saved InstaPaper or Read It Later articles, as well as anything on your Google Reader RSS news feed. We are expecting Read It Aloud to make it out of our development lab before the end of November and into the App Store just in time for you to stay in touch with your personalized news sources during the crush of holiday shopping.

We have just submitted Friends Aloud 3.0, with Nuance-powered (Siri-like) speech recognition to the App Store. If they approve in the usual week or so, it should go live towards the end of next week. We are all excited to have this one almost in the hands of our loyal users.

Tweets Aloud 3.0, with similar new features, is in beta and following hot on the heels of Friends Aloud 3.0. It could make it to the App Store as early as next week, too.

We were delighted to read a Forbes article about how Apple stock could more than double on the sheer power of Siri. As a developer who is exending Siri's speech recognition to the several million existing iOS devices, not just the latest and greatest iPhone 4S, we are sympathetic about what that article's author had to say about the importance of speech recognition to the future of mobile devices:

• Siri is bringing in new customers who were previously Android users or who were not using smart phones.  I initially drew this preliminary conclusion from my conversations with a number of AT&T store managers.  Now there is a variety of data from a number of sources supporting this conclusion. 
• Siri increases stickiness of Apple phones.  High stickiness means that once someone starts using Siri they are unlikely to switch.  When asked to call my wife, Siri responded with question wanting to know which one of my contacts was my wife.   After about 10 minutes, when I again asked Siri to call my wife, it knew who my wife was.  Imagine Siri learning about you and what you do for two years and then giving up Siri for an Android phone that does not know you!
• In due course Siri will migrate search revenues from Google (GOOG) to Apple.
• Siri raises the bar for Google Android and Microsoft (MSFT) Mango to compete. 

We at VoiZapp, like Apple, believe that the future of mobile devices is speech-enabled!

Friends Aloud 3.0 with Siri-like speech recognition is now in beta-testing. We expect to submit it to the App Store in a week or two. As existing users who upgraded to iPhone 4S may have already discovered, Friends Aloud 2.0 and Tweets Aloud 2.0 now have keyboards with optional Siri-powered speech recognition available via a small microphone icon next to the spacebar. But the hundreds of millions of pre-iPhone 4S iOS users were left behind. VoiZapp will soon give all iOS users of its Aloud series of products the ability to use Siri-like speech recognition natively within its entire product line, starting with Friends Aloud 3.0. This is a monumental shift in user interfaces, aptly summed up in this article by Robert Hof:

“Siri is the culmination of the Jobs legacy,” contends Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at the venture capital firm Morgenthaler Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif. Morgenthaler was the first VC investor in Siri and was a board member until Apple acquired it, as well as an investor and board member of Nuance Communications, the voice recognition software company whose technology also is used by Siri. Both companies were spun out of the research institute SRI International.

In an exclusive interview, Morgenthaler provided a revealing look at how Siri developed and what it could potentially do–including how it could reshape the worlds of e-commerce and advertising. Morgenthaler makes a good case that Siri represents the third revolution in human-computer interfaces (emphasis ours) that Jobs perfected and popularized. The first was the graphical user interface, using a mouse as a pointing device, which Jobs adapted (some might say stole) from Xerox PARC and SRI to make the Macintosh. The second came in the iPod and the iPad, using a gestural interface–again, not a technology it invented, but anyone who uses Apple’s touch technology knows it performs better than anyone else’s. The third, Morgenthaler contends, is a conversational interface epitomized by Siri. “It could create a new paradigm for interacting with computers, a new man-machine interface,” he says. “We are at a turning point in history where people can talk to a computer and be understood. It’s a watershed moment where people won’t go back.”

We at VoiZapp believe that Morganthaler is exactly right about Jobs' legacy. Once you experience the power of being able to listen to your Facebook news feed and then reply naturally in your own voice with updates, comments, and likes, you'll never want to hunch over a keyboard again. Here's a short video demo of Friends Aloud 3.0. Look for it soon in the App Store. As always, you can purchase Friends Aloud 2.0 now and automatically update to 3.0 for free the instant that it becomes available.

 

Last month we released a new version of Friends Aloud 2.0, and follow up this week with a new version of Tweets Aloud 2.0. The main feature we have just added is the ability to compose new Status Updates, Comments, or Tweets using the built-in iOS keyboard. However, as VoiZapp is focused on speech, we are delighted to note that the just-released iPhone 4S now comes with a little microphone button next to the spacebar on the built-in keyboard, thereby enabling you to compose using Siri's automated speech recognition capability. Naturally, Siri misses what you said sometimes, in which case the full keyboard is still available for correcting what it heard. 

This upgrade is, of course, free to existing users. If you just purchased an iPhone 4S and don't already own Friends Aloud or Tweets Aloud apps, you can purchase them from Apple's App Store for $1.99 apiece. Then you can stay in touch with your friends via Facebook and Twitter strictly via your voice, both coming and going!

VoiZapp's research labs have been very busy adding hands-free operation to our Aloud line of reading aloud apps. This technology is standard in Star Trek: remember how Spock or Kirk could start a conversation with the Enterprise's computer with by simply saying, "Computer?" Remember when Scottie tried that with an early MacPlus in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home? To our knowledge, no iOS app has cracked the code to do that yet. VoiZapp has, and we are feverishly incorporating this technology into our new reading aloud apps Reader Aloud and Later Aloud, both of which are slated to be released next month (considerably earlier than the 23rd century). Once we get them out, we will retrofit this voice-control technology into existing apps Friends Aloud and Tweets Aloud. When we're done, you will be able to control your VoiZapp apps via simple, intuitive voice commands -- Play | Read [Aloud], Pause | Stop [Reading], Skip [Forward | Reverse], Go Back | Review | Previous, etc. No voice training required, of course, nothing to memorize, and exceptional recognition accuracy. It just works.

We are adding our world-class voice command technology to the website/blog reading aloud apps first because we believe that iOS 5, when released in September, will incorporate full dictation-quality automated speech recognition (ASR) licensed from Nuance. Nuance's Dragon Dictate is the $6 billion gorilla in the room, so we hope and expect to use their technology to compose Facebook and/or Twitter posts, replies, and messages strictly via your voice. Our R&D plan then, subject as always to the vicissitudes of the market, remains to incorporate voice control first, to be closely followed by the addition of Nuance's voice dictation through VoiZapp's line of Aloud apps. It's going to be a busy summer here at VoiZapp.