Google Android has built-in speech recognition, which means you can translate speech to text in many apps. But Edwin is one of the few that will talk back. For instance, you can ask Edwin the time, and it will tell you. Ask it for tomorrow’s forecast and a computerized voice will read it to you. You can even ask it to translate words or sentences from one language to another or to define or spell words for you.

Edwin also works as an app launcher and controller for your phone’s hardware. For instance, you can tell it to put your phone in airplane mode or turn the Bluetooth on or off. Or you can tell it to open the camera application.

Like most speech recognition apps, Edwin isn’t perfect. Or maybe it’s just my voice that isn’t perfect. Sometimes it misunderstands commands, and while you’re supposed to be able to open applications by saying “launch X” or “open X,” I’ve found that it works a lot better with “open.” But overall, it’s a pretty nifty little application, and best of all it’s available as a free download.

After the break is a video showing how Edwin responds when I ask it for the time, temperature, nearest movie theater, and other information.

via Gizmodo

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Most Google Android handsets include voice recognition features. Basically whenever you’re in an app that requires text input, you can hit the microphone icon on the keyboard and talk into the phone’s mic. Android will try to convert your speech to text, saving you the trouble of typing.

But Vlingo takes voice input to another level, with its new app for Android. Vlingo adds a widget to your home screen which you can tap to launch a voice input box. Then you can tell your phone to perform all sorts of different actions.

For example, you can say “Send message to <contact>” and then speak a message to launch the txt message app and fill in the To and Message boxes. You can say “Twitter update,” followed by a message to launch the Twitter app and post a status update.

Vlingo doesn’t just do speech to text. It also has a speech to text feature called SafeReader which will read incoming text messages and other notifications to you, which could come in handy if you’re in the car or somewhere else where you shouldn’t be fumbling with your phone.

Vlingo should be available for $9.99 from the Android Market — but I wasn’t able to find it when I checked a few minutes ago.

The app should run on Android 2.2 and newer devices.

Vlingo also offers apps for iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia, and Windows Mobile devices.