• On mySimon: The North Face Mountain Sneakers for Men
August 12, 2008 4:58 PM PDT

MyCaption app for BlackBerry: free your thumbs

by Dong Ngo
  • Font size
  • Print
  • 1 comment

Talk your thoughts into e-mails.

(Credit: MyCaption)

MyCaption, a member of the BlackBerry Alliance, introduced on Tuesday a new way BlackBerry users can work with e-mails on their smartphones: by speaking.

Actually, this is not exactly a breakthrough, as voice recognition technology has been out there for a long time and can be found in the Voice Command or Voice Dialing features of many smartphones. However, this seems to be the first time you can use it for more than simple sentences, such as, "Call Johnny at the office."

MyCaption claims that its new application is sophisticated enough that people can compose, forward, or reply to e-mails by speaking comfortably into the phone. You then will have the option to preview the texts before actually sending them off. The application can work with multiple e-mail accounts.

MyCaption currently works on the BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, and 8800. For a limited time, it's available to download as a free trial.;this lets you send 10 messages for free. After that, according to the company's Web site, you can either pay $1 for each message or pay $10/month to send unlimited messages of 15 seconds in length, or fewer. Even when you opt for the monthly plan, you still have to pay $.50 per message for messages that are longer than 15 seconds. The longest message the application can process is 3 minutes.

This seems like a very useful tool that will free your thumbs from the little keyboard. More importantly, now you can potentially talk to a business partner over the phone and then send him the transcript of the conversation in an e-mail. Maybe this will bring a whole new meaning to the term "verbal contract." Who says talking is not writing in black and white?

Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong.
Recent posts from Crave
Killer deals on BlackBerry, Droid, and Palm Pixi
This week in Crave: The boxed-in edition
Ricky Gervais helps reveal pain of cell phone salesmen
Indecent Exposure 68: Inky extents
Apple fixes AirPort problems marring video playback on 27-inch iMacs
iPhone: The board gamer's paradise
Can erasing your iPhone's memory improve performance?
Top 5 best products of the fall
Add a Comment (Log in or register)
by blackcoffeenosugar August 20, 2008 7:33 PM PDT
Well. The idea of paying for emails will probably never take off. At least I hope not.
Reply to this comment

About Crave

The name says it all. Crave is our blog about gorgeous gadgets and other crushworthy stuff. If you would like to contact Crave with a tip or comment, please write to: crave@cnet.com

Add this feed to your online news reader

Crave topics

A CNET Conversation with Eric Schmidt

CNET's Tom Krazit and Molly Wood sit down with Google CEO Eric Schmidt to discuss the future of Android, the Chrome OS, the problem of real-time search indexing, and more.

Verizon tests sending RIAA copyright notices

The No. 2 phone company, known for its reluctance to intervene in antipiracy cases, strikes an agreement to forward copyright notices on behalf of the music industry.