G’day Mr Google. I tried out your voice searching today, and sorry it sucks. Ok, so you made the disclaimer it works best with a North American accent. Sorry, but that ain’t good enough. You see, I’ve used reQall’s voice recognition and it craps all over yours - North American accent or not.  But I thought you guys were the ones with the money; I thought you guys had technology and experts to burn.

reQall isn’t my favourite task manager - actually, truth be known, none are (anyone who wants to code the world’s best To Do app, call me). It is the nicest looking though. But it’s voice recognition blew me away. With no training at all, and with my dinky-di, true blue Aussie, non-American accent, it was getting, I reckon, around 90% recognition.

I did a short test with the following statement:

“Hello, this thing gives you only thirty seconds. I am calling from ***, in Victoria, Australia” (Yes, I live in asteriskville)

Okay, reQall interpreted that as:
“Hello, this thing gives you only thirty seconds. I am calling from [??], and Victoria, Australia” So it couldn’t recognize my town name and misheard the “in” as “and”. Score 14/16 = 87.5%

Okay, let’s see what Google came back with (you’ll like this):
“Hello miss teen USA 2nd hand going from cinderalla in victoria australia”

LMAO. So, it got four words right, including the “in” that reQall missed. Score: 4/16, 25%

Again, Google have the North American accent disclaimer, but hey that’s a cop out really. If reQall (a dot on the dot.com landscape compared to Google) can do it with my Aussie accent, why can’t Google?

Simple solution, Mr Google, ditch yours and buy reQall.

For anyone interested, reQall records your note (unfortunately limited to 30 seconds - sad, coz I had visions of using it for dictation, it’s that good) and then sends it to its server. About 10 mins later it comes back to you transcribed. Seriously excellent! You can also add tasks via keyboard.

That last point tho is one thing I will grant Google, theirs is almost instantaneous. But then, I bet they have a lot more server grunt.