According to those numbers, it appears that Apple may have already reached 10 million iPhone sales f…

Filed under: Software, iPhone, App Store

I want my iPhone to have voice dialing. Belgian developers Creaceed are moving in the right direction by introducing the Vocalia English speech recognition tool for iPhone. This app just does one thing right now — displaying contacts from your Address Book when you say names. You still need to tap on the name that appears to open the contact, then tap on a number to dial it. Creaceed is working on adding new functionality to future versions.

How well does Vocalia recognize names? I tested it by reading the first 100 names in Contacts. Without training Vocalia, it was able to correctly recognize 98 of the names — that is, it put them on a screen with three of the closest sounding names. For 83 of the names, the correct name was at the top of the list. The two names that weren’t recognized properly were Guilherme and Guiseppe. You can also add nicknames or other pronunciations to any name to further improve accuracy.

Between now and October 18th, Vocalia is on sale for US$3.99 in the App Store (click opens iTunes). The regular price of Vocalia is $7.99.

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Filed under: Software, iPhone, iPod touch

Forbes is reporting that the iPhone has become the country’s top eBook reader. The claim is based upon the number of downloads of Stanza [App Store link], an ebook reader for the iPhone and iPod touch (395,000 and counting), versus the number of projected US Kindle sales (380,000).

For those unfamiliar with Stanza, it’s a free application that lets users download books over the air, as does the Kindle. All of Stanza’s offerings are free works in the public domain, and flipping pages is a breeze with the touch screen.

Of course, it’s silly to compare an iPhone to a Kindle. The screen is very tiny and I wouldn’t want to read anything longer than an email message with it. However, many people will, some of whom do it just because they can. I can remember reading a Stephen King book on my old Palm ///e simply because I thought it was neat.

Still, combine the 395,000 downloads of Stanza with nearly 380,000 Kindles sold (plus the Sony eBook reader figures), and it seems that many people enjoy reading very tiny type.

[Via MacDailyNews]

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