Today Vlingo introduced an upgrade of its speech-enabling software for the iPhone that has a totally new look, but more importantly adds the ability for owners to dictate and send email and content that can be pasted into SMS messages. I said "owners" as opposed to users because the new capabilities are being introduced as features that can be purchased "inside" the application. Individually, each feature carries a $6.99 price, but can be purchased as a bundle for $9.99.

Once purchased, the new features are nestled seamlessly within the Vlingo application, which means that Vlingo has largely cracked the code in terms of user convenience and reduction of application latencies. Its nearest competitors, on the iPhone at least, are Dragon Dictation (from Nuance) and ShoutOut (from Promptu).

All three applications are comparable in terms ability to accurately render utterances. The big difference is Vlingo's ability to differentiate between commands and content. Where others require users to choose their delivery mechanism either before or after dictating content, Vlingo is designed to "understand" that when I say "Text Dari Barzel I'm going to be late coming home", I mean: Send a text to the wireless phone of Dari Barzel saying "I'm going to be late coming home."

After rendering the dictation, it takes me to the messaging app in the iPhone where I double tap in order to paste the message in an SMS. It is a tiny bit clunky, but is still a time saver. Promptu, by contrast enables its users to choose the recipient from the phone's contact list and then sends the SMS through an email gateway. It is fairly convenient for the message originator, but comes through with some strange heading information for the recipient to interpret (including some "smiley faces" in the place of punctuation in some instances).

Like Vlingo, Nuance's Dragon employs the native texting capabilities of the iPhone, meaning that the user exits the application and double taps the text entry bar to "paste" the rendered text before sending. Unlike Vlingo, Dragon starts with a screen designed for the input of dictated text. It then prompts users to designate whether the message is to be sent via email, SMS or simply stored to the iPhone's clipboard. After selecting the designated option, it exits Dragon and goes to the native messaging app, where, unlike Vlingo, users must choose the recipient manually from the phone's contact list. Thus Vlingo, in this case is a time saver.

By adding SMS and email, Vlingo is adding to the "speechable moments" on the iPhone. Google had done much the same by speech-enabling the search box in the Google application, as did Microsoft with Bing Mobile. Collectively, they are making voice input to a phone "cool" again, and the result is more frequent use. In the aggregate, Vlingo's Hadley Harris told us, the average rate of usage is "five times per day". It varies by region and "platform" but it spans Search, Messaging, Voice Dial and Social applications (like updating Twitter or Facebook). On platforms that offer it, "text messaging" is the most common. On the iPhone, the most common use has been generic search.

As Harris explained "We we differentiate around our vision of being anything to the phone and Vlingo recognizing it and taking action." That means that the application recognizes the users intent in real time and takes action on it. Accuracy is getting better, but more importantly "task completion" has been steadily improving as well. Completion of tasks, which ultimately culminate in a trasaction, broadens the spectrum of prospective revenue models in the speech-enabled mobile world.