S-Voice's Practical Application

This post is a part of mobilers mission.
One of the features of Samsung S-III  is the S Voice, a SIRI equivalent to apple fans. It is a virtual mobile digital assistant that can talk back to the user when asked a question. It can be helpful and handy specially with trivia like questions, as long as the answer is located on it's data base, or explore the internet as needed to fetch for the best answer.

How to use it?

As the data base which is the source of it's intelligence is located somewhere at samsung servers, the S Voice needs an internet connection to work. It can be from 3G/HSPDA connection provided by your mobile company or through a wi-fi network.

The application can be started by a double tap on the home button, or by a tap at the application's icon shortcut button.

What does the S Voice can do?

Practical uses

Placing a call and sending a message

Dozens of tasks can be performed by the S-Voice through voice command, like calling somebody on your contacts. This function is useful when your hands are tied up to something and doesn't have the chance of fiddling your device to bring up the list of your contacts.

Another situation is when you are out in bright day light and the brightness of your screen is set to automatic mode, chances are you can not see the things being shown at your screen. Then you ask yourself how can you make a call? You like to change the setting of your screen but will not be able to because you do not know where to press.  With the S-Voice, just double tap the home button and command S-Voice to call anyone in your contact. Or you can dictate which number to call if the number is not yet in your contacts. You can as well send a text with simple messages, which is quite very handy, in fact one of my favourite and most used S-Voice function.

Set up alarm time easily

Another favourite is the easy way to set up the alarm with S-Voice. Just say wake me up at 6:30 and an alarm  for 6:30 am is set. Say wake me up at  8:30 pm or 20:30, S-Voice will set up 8:30pm alarm. Very useful and you can do this with your eyes closed, especially when you are too lazy to fiddle with the buttons and icons after another tiring day.

Play a specific MP3 music file

Say "play " and S-Voice plays your MP3 music stored within the phone, specify the title of the song like "play Smile" then the MP3 with "smile" title plays. Brilliant, specially when you have hundreds of music within your device and you do not have the time searching for the title of the music manually. S-Voice really saves you time and effort with this.

And other uses

Turning on applications

The S-Voice can open up native applications that are available within the phone, like calculator, browser, camera, and other downloaded applications like facebook and tweeter. You can actually update your status on both social networks by just dictating it to S-Voice. Unluckily I can not make a screenshot with this as the phone opens up the page after I dictate the command.

Navigation

S-Voice uses google maps when you want to use it as a navigator. But instead of dictating post codes, which S-Voice does not understand, the full address is needed. On my experience, it is useful in locating specific places like tube stations. Tell S-Voice to navigate to a name of a tube station and google map takes care of the rest. You need to enable first the  location services when you want this function.

And more

It can also open up simple phone settings, other phone functions like bluetooth, voice recorder, downloaded applications and many more. See screenshot below on the things S-Voice can do.

My personal thoughts

I can not deny that S-Voice made some of the task sweat free and easier to use on some applications than manual fiddling. It can be refined to help people with visual impairments and help them have confidence in having and using a mobile phone. This would be a good news to blind users.

The only thing that I do not like is the fact that it still needs internet to work even with the basic commands like  opening up an application  or dialling a number. I hope in the future the artificial intelligence needed to perform these basic functions will be built into the device and does not need internet access.