IM+ Update Brings Voice To Text
Posted on 14 October 2009, at 8:15 pm, by Dan Cohen
Back in August Larry and I both got a chance to check out an early version of Shape Services coming update to their IM+ Instant Messaging application. Well the update is out and is sports some nice improvements! Version 3.4…
- Brings Animated Emoticons.
- Allows you to copy text from chat bubbles.
- Brings new email notifications via Push – for Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail.
AND… it introduces Speech recognition as an in-app purchase feature.
That’s right, for just $.99 a month you can now simply speak your IMs and let the app do the rest. It is pretty awesome. As an aside, I’m currently testing some other upcoming apps that work with voice recognition and can say with certainty that THIS IS the wave of the future!!
So what did we think when we initially tested it? Take a look at this post to find out or stay tuned for an updated look!
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October 15th, 2009 at 11:41 am
There are definitely improvements, but there are some negatives too.
They seem to have removed auto-correct. That is NOT an improvement, unfortunately.
Also the startup time / connection time is significantly longer than before. Once in, the basic IM function seems nice and snappy, but there are periods where it seems to “hang” while reconnecting. I’m not sure what the problem is. The previous version didn’t do that.
I’m also not crazy about the add-in fee for speech recognition, even though I do understand their desire to charge for a “premium” service, but I’d rather see it backed into the price of the app, which already isn’t cheap. At the very least, I’d like to see a trial period first to see how well it worked with my speech patterns before I spend money on the feature.