Tagless voice-dialing on the BlackBerry Pearl

Ever since posting my Jawbone review, I’ve received a ton of e-mail asking specific questions about the headset (as I welcomed in the earlier post). A couple of months ago (yes, I’m just getting around to writing about this now; ugh) I received an inquiry from someone regarding whether the Jawbone supported tagless voice-dialing,1 and in one of my very rare moments of gadget ignorance, I noted that that would be a function of the phone and not the headset, and that in any event I couldn’t test it because my BlackBerry Pearl didn’t support such a feature. In fact, I hadn’t heard of any phone that could do tagless voice-dialing. Imagine my surprise then when this guy e-mailed me back and told me that the Pearl is indeed capable of this little wonder.

Now, to be fair to me (and my fragile ego), I gave up on voice-dialing many years ago. It never seemed to work well (on any phone) and so I just kind of quit caring about it. Not to mention that recording tags for my most-called contacts was a ridiculous chore given the frequency with which I changed phones. In reading phone reviews (or writing my own), it was a subject I simply ignored completely, and in casual conversation I’d quickly dismiss it.

With that background experience in mind, you probably understand that I was fully expecting this tagless voice-dialing to suck to the point of unusable and for me to immediately fall back to my previous stance on the technology. But it didn’t suck. In fact, it hasn’t messed up once in almost two months of me using it. Not once.

Me: Call Sarah.

Phone: Calling Sarah.

Me: Brillyunt!

Color me impressed. Just one more reason the Pearl remains the best phone going right now (despite it having only EDGE). Other well-informed people agree.

Tagless voice-dialing is the ability to specify a contact in your address book without having to record their name beforehand and without having to train the device to your voice — the software/hardware is smart enough to deduce the intended contact from your words alone. ↩