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If you’ve got an Android-powered T-Mobile MyTouch 3G Slide, voice company Vlingo wants to do you a favor–by giving you its $9.99 app for free.
Speak the words and Vlingo’s voice launcher for Android will open apps on your phone, update your Twitter and Facebook status, dial contacts, and send e-mails and texts as you dictate them. You can also tell it to search the Web and Google Maps. Its SafeReader feature can relay incoming e-mails and texts so drivers can keep their eyes on the wheel.
So, what prompted Vlingo’s sudden generosity, and why is its benevolence aimed at MyTouch 3G Slide users alone? “We feel so sorry for them,” Dave Grannan, Vlingo’s CEO told CNET in an interview.
Grannan was referring to the phone’s user interface, which we’ll admit doesn’t offer the most intuitive method out of the box for launching Android’s built-in voice commands and voice dialing. What Grannan didn’t freely admit is that Vlingo is also trying to elbow into the competition’s territory, in this case a baked-in voice technology powered by rival Nuance, a speech recognition company made famous by creating the T9 system of predictive text.
Either way, Grannan’s statement of pity is couched in “ouch.”
Vlingo’s offer is on for a limited, but unspecified, time whose span will likely have a lot to do with how eager MyTouch 3G Slide users are to take advantage of the giveaway. To get started, initiate the download process on Vlingo.com and Vlingo will automatically send a direct download link to MyTouch 3G Slide handsets.
