Palm and Treo Hacks

Dial with Your Voice

Use your voice instead of your fingers to dial your Treo. This can be useful if your hands are occupied.

You might not see the need for voice dialing until you’ve tried to dial a contact while driving. Even if you’re very familiar with navigating your contacts single-handedly, you still have to glance at the keypad from time to time. With voice dialing, it becomes much easier and safer to perform this task. Most cell phones come with some kind of voice dialing system as a standard feature, and most generally follow the same sequence to dial a contact:

1. Push a button to put the phone into listen mode, as seen in Figure 5-6.

2. Speak the name of the contact you wish to dial into the phone, which attempts to translate what you’ve spoken into a known contact.

3. The verification phase, which is typically optional, though on by default, will cause the phone to speak the matching contact’s name (if a match was found) back to you, so you are sure it’s calling the right person, as Figure 5-7 shows. You will have the option to cancel the call if necessary; for example, sometimes “Lab” might be recognized in error by the phone as “Dad,” so this verification step prevents you from calling the wrong contact.

4. The contact is dialed.

Strangely, however, neither the Treo 600 nor the Treo 650 comes with built-in voice dialing, despite this feature being one of the top customer requests. You do have options, though none are free. Table 5-1 shows a breakdown of the most popular voice dialing ...