Over spring break 2011, I built a few voice apps using QuickFuse (quickfuseapps.com), which is a web app that allows easy creation of interactive voice response applications through drag-and-drop modules. None of the apps I made are fully functional as they were rapidly prototyped. Below are the descriptions of what I made:
Hands Free Messenger
Allows you to text, tweet, and email through speech. I ran into some difficulties, especially with the email module since you have to specify a carrier and thus either have to use a single carrier (I just used gmail) or ask the user for a carrier and then branch depending on what they answered.
Meet N Eat
Look for nearby dining locations, broadcast where you are going, and see if other people in the area are going to the same spot.
Meet N Eat modules
Nearest Neighbor
Allows users to list their current locations as they're driving, and find out which other drivers are nearby that have also listed themselves as available. Aimed for the social aspect that seems to be incredibly popular in apps these days, but I abandoned this after I realized the potential for stalker abuse was too high.
QuickFuse Summary
QuickFuse is a really convenient web application for designing IVR (interactive voice response) apps, and it's cool to see how their backend processes voice pretty well. However, while testing my app I ran into the philosophy of voice apps - how they might be more convenient than what we have now?
Pros:
-After the initial dial, does not require further physical interaction.
Cons:
-Talking to a machine isn't the same as talking to a person.
-The speech recognition is far from perfect - accents, homonyms, numbers all have some issues. Numbers were especially annoying because they cannot be clumped and have to be said in a specific, digit-ized way.
Check out http://quickfuseapps.com/ if you're interested in playing around with this. They give you free call quota on sign up.
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