What is Voice Control?

Voice Control MAIN GOAL IS:

• To be a tool and a vocal interface that allows to perform specific and quick tasks totally in a eyes-free and hands-free way, mainly designed to be used with an helmet bluetooth headset while driving a motorbike with the phone in the pocket.
• To be a tool easily translatable, in order to be used from people in other languages than the two that I know directly (that are English and Italian).

Voice Control could also be:

• A vocal interface to use the phone while driving the car using a bluetooth headset (preferred) or the speakerphone, with limited eyes and hands interaction to reduce at minimum the drive hazard.
• A vocal interface that allows to perform complicated task not fully possible in an eyes-free and hands-free way (like open web searches that must be checked on the screen or start a video playback).
• A tool that uses features provided by the phone to do some work, trying to manage such features in order to provide the best and simplest user experience possible.

Voice Control will be:

• A pluggable tool that will allows other people or developers to write their own voice actions, making them installable from the market and usable inside Voice Control.

Voice Control IS NOT:

• An AI (Artificial Intelligence) virtual assistant to chat with: there are already monsters like Google, Vlingo and Apple that have enough resources, people and money to create such wonderful applications.
• A Text-To-Speech engine that make the phone speak: there are already great and good quality Text-To-Speech engines available on the market (like SVOX and Loquendo), that can be installed on the phone and used by Voice Control.
• A Voice-Recognition engine that transcribe what is said: there are already great Voice-Recognition engines available on the market shipped with other applications (like Google Voice Search and Vlingo), that can be installed on the phone and used by Voice Control.

Why Voice Control isn't free:

• If it was free, it would never been completed. Voice Control has been started for a personal need (I usually need to use the phone while driving my scooter), and it would been abandoned after some week of works or at least after the first partial release. Making it a Paid Application, allows me to get a partial return of all the time spent working on it (that on December 2011 should amount about to 1000 hours of work for a total of exactly X lines of code).
• It give to me enough motivation to continue to improve and support it.
• This ensure that only interested users install it and requests new features according to Voice Control main goal.