Don't Have Siri but Want to Talk to Your Older iPhone?

Most of us don't have an iPhone 4S but may look semi-covetously on those who are able to talk to Siri and get a response to almost any question.  We know we can talk to our phones with the iPhone voice control feature, telling it to call a phone number or play a playlist.  But those people with the new iPhones can search the web, find a restaurant, and even send an email. You can't do those things with the voice control feature.

This is where Vlingo comes in.  Vlingo is the Siri for the rest of us.  Although it's not built into iOS, like Siri, once you launch the app, it is super-easy to use.  You just press a button and speak, starting your sentence with certain keywords.  For example, you could say, "email Tim, subject testing vlingo" and it would create an email to Tim, whoever that is, with the subject "testing vlingo".  It will update Facebook and if you say something like "update Facebook I'm writing a blog post right now."  You can even send text messages (SMS) and update Twitter.

While it's not as slick as Siri, it's voice recognition is pretty good. Go get it from iTunes today. It's free, and it includes email and SMS for free, though the Vlingo web site says that email and SMS are a $6.99 purchase.  These features used to cost $6.99 but went they went free shortly after the iPhone 4S came out.