[tweetmeme]When I last reviewed Vlingo, the iPhone speech-to-text apps were just about taking off. Then recently Dragon showed up with its amazing app, and practically ruled the ‘dictation’ market—small as it may be. But it can’t do smaller things like sending out status messages, or doing web searches. Vlingo 2.0 hopes to encompass Email, SMS, and all the rest, into one single voice based workflow. Whether it works is a totally different matter.

Version 2.0 comes with a bunch of pretty. Everything from the deep bokeh splash screen, to the juicy control bar at the bottom, Vlingo has definitely got some pixel polish, even with usability and workflow. Vlingo’s workflow is based on uttering the action, and then speaking the words. So “Facebook update I’m bored” would prepare a facebook update with (hopefully) those words. You can combine facebook and twitter by just saying “Status update” instead. Using the ridiculously expensive—speaking in App Store economy—in-app purchases, you can add email and SMS functionality—$7 for email or SMS, and $10 for both. With these two, it combines multiple actions into one, so you can say “Email Preshit subject Smoking Apples has been hacked! message Just kidding, but I got you there didn’t I?”. For the record it did get the person right, and even the subject (didn’t catch the exclamation), and the message ignored the comma and couldn’t figure out what happened at the end.

Which brings to whether this thing is useful. I’m going to agree with Michael Rose’s review at TUAW. Its accuracy is good, but nothing compared to Dragon’s speech-to-text app. Vlingo gets most of the words right, but there’s always one of them that comes up borked, so you have to go in and edit it, defeating the purpose. And that’s the problem with these apps. You’re never sure it will go through the first time, and knowing you might end up spending more time on trying to get it work, you might as well type it out. There’s no way you’re going to want to send twitter updates using this. It takes too long to launch the app, say the message, wait for it to think, then hope the conversion was right, and finally send it out. I don’t see it fitting into a web search workflow either. Web searching is not linear, and involve a lot of unconventional words and nouns, that the app will definitely get wrong. The only functionality that makes sense for dictation on the iPhone is long form writing, which in Vlingo’s case, is email. But that is currently ruled by Dragon’s free app. Dragon is not only better with recognition, you can also see your text appear as you speak, not having to wait for the app to think it all at once and show you how badly you speak.

For speech-to-text to work on the iPhone, straight up dictation has got to be at the forefront. Speaking long form text, and sending emails would be two workflows that would be sped up by dictation, and Dragon’s does that. It’s the only reason you’d want to launch the app and begin speaking. The other reason, voice dialing, has been handled natively since iPhone 3.0, so there’s no reason to include that. Things like twitter and facebook are a distant second—I question whether they should to be there in the first place. Vlingo thinks that tapping a button is equivalent to typing, so instead of speaking your text and then tapping the action, you have to say the action itself. This leaves room for error and involves a learning curve. It might work in a futuristic workflow where the computer is intelligent enough to understand when you’re speaking to it, but the current mode of launching an app and tapping a ‘speak now’ button, add to that the inaccuracy in output, makes voice based instructions pointless.

Vlingo’s UI is definitely something to look at, but I’m afraid its usability is a different matter. Your mileage may vary. Free at the App Store.