I’ve been trying to use Vlingo on my iPhone recently. Vlingo is a free app that allows you to search the web, dial contacts, and update your status on Twitter and Facebook just using your voice. Wow, huh?
Well…
When I took a long road trip recently, I realized that this was the perfect opportunity to update Twitter without freaking my wife out by typing on my tiny keyboard while in transit. Enter Vlingo.
I am driving this giant moving truck, and my brain, trained by 80’s television starts to think, “You know, there is room back there for a car. And not just a car – but entire office and computer system. And not just any car – but KITT.” Then I imagined KITT flying out of the trailer of the truck I was driving, spinning around on the highway, driving up parallel to me and David Hasselhoff throwing me a big thumbs up.
It was a long drive.
So – I grab my iPhone and do a status update with Vlingo. I speak slowly and clearly:
What if, instead of my junk, the back of this truck held a high-tech computer system and a black car named Kitt?
A decent status update, I think, and well under my allotted 140 characters.
This is what Vlingo returned:
Thankfully Vlingo gives you the option to edit before you hit update. Notice the stars? Vlingo thinks I’m cursing, but they’ve taken it upon themselves to star that out for me. Little do they know that it’s their very product that will in the end drive me to curse.
Granted, my status updates are generally a little more complicated than “headed to San Francisco” or whatever he says in the demonstration, but if you can’t get your full 140 characters worth – why use Vlingo to update your status at all?
This is when I started to see Vlingo’s real (and unadvertised) usefulness – as a comedy tool.
So I tried again, same status, “What if, instead of my junk, the back of this truck held a high-tech computer system and a black car named Kitt?”
It can’t recognize the simple four letter word “junk” (I never once got it to) but it knows “Brad Pitt” and even capitalizes his name?
I probably tried a dozen times with the same status, using different enunciations and speeds of speech but to no avail.
Before I gave up (like I said - this was a long and lonely drive), I decided to try a different variation on this, a more haiku-ish way of saying the same thing:
In the back of this truck
Not my junk
But a black car named Kitt.
Vlingo’s response would give me a word picture that will unfortunately haunt me for a long time to come:
Vlingo, it seems, was mocking me.
Well, I would have the last laugh, only of course after deleting Vlingo from my phone.
