![]() ![]() This requires reading 122 words out loud as they appear on the phone's screen, and Katie did this in a few minutes. To set up VoiceMode for the first time, you must teach your phone the acoustics of your speaking style. The p207 is a handsome all-black flip phone with a built-in camera that, outwardly, betrays no sign of its special capability. In our tests, the system made so many errors requiring tedious corrections that it might have been faster for us to peck out our messages the old-fashioned way - especially if we used the abbreviations and shorthand phrases so common among text-messaging fans. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well. If it works properly, VoiceMode should make composing a text message as simple as dictating a voice-mail message. This technology, called VoiceMode, was created by a small Massachusetts company called VoiceSignal Technologies Inc. The Samsung p207, $79.99 with a two-year contract from Cingular Wireless, has built-in "speech-to-text" technology: It turns what you say into text on the screen. This new phone lets you dictate your text messages by just speaking into the phone. ![]() This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I tested a new phone that attempts to solve the text-entry problem in a novel way that doesn't involve typing, and can be used on a small, inexpensive phone with just a numerical keypad. But these keyboards usually make phones bigger and bulkier than normal, and often show up only on costlier models, like the Treo or BlackBerry. Phone makers have tried to solve this problem by squeezing little keyboards into the bodies of some phones. "R u goin 2 b l8?" is text-speak for "Are you going to be late?" Typing out full sentences using this method is even more annoying, leading users to get creative with abbreviations and short-spellings. If you're unfamiliar with using a numerical keypad to enter text (lucky you), spelling out a simple word like "dance," for example, would require pressing 3, 2, 66, 222, 33. But cellphones are notoriously frustrating to use for entering text. Cellphone text messaging, long popular abroad, is finally catching on in the United States, especially among younger users.
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