How I Solved My Siri Envy with Vlingo
Having heard about the iPhone 4S and Siri, I wanted to experiment with it and see how well it worked. Laura’s old iPhone 3GS had a cracked screen, so she bought the new iPhone 4S. She showed it to me and I thought Siri was very interesting and we became curious if there was something similar to it for the iPhone 3G. We began searching and we found Vlingo.
Vlingo is free to install and available for not only iPhones, but Android, Windows and Blackberry users as well. There is also a Vlingo Plus that charges a one-time fee, but that appears to be available for Samsung Jack and HTC users only.
We compared Vlingo on my iPhone 3G and Siri on Laura’s iPhone 4S together and took this video. They do both need to be connected to the internet in order to work.
I was very surprised at how well Vlingo did. My poor old 3G has slower internet than Laura’s iPhone, but it was only seconds behind when we searched for turtles. When we both called a phone number I forgot to push the button a second time otherwise it would have called at the same time. I like that with Vlingo you can choose when it starts listening, while in Siri you start as soon as you start the program. As you can see, Vlingo works slightly better than in Siri when emailing.
I was slightly disappointed with Vlingo when trying to set an appointment. Hilariously, it searched for “set an appointment at 5:00 tomorrow” in Google. Vlingo Does have some other disadvantages as well:
- When starting the app, it asked for access to my contacts, so it doesn’t already have access to my contacts.
- In Vlingo, you must hit the button again to stop it rather than it noticing when you stop talking like Siri does.
- We found that Vlingo doesn’t have access to the Apple apps like the calendar, reminders or alarms.
For those of you who already have an iPhone 4S then you wouldn’t be interested in Vlingo, but for all of us who have older generation iPhones (or Android, Blackberry or Windows phones) I would suggest Vlingo. It cannot access the calendar or the alarms, but it can do everything else Siri can and will solve your Siri Envy nicely.