For those of you lamenting that Apple didn’t include voice recognition in its latest iPhone software release, your prayers may have been answered. Makayama is offering a free trial of its VoiceDial application with a $5 discount ($28) if you buy before February. Sounds good, especially for iPhone users facing California’s “hands free” cell phone law taking effect July 1. According to Makayama’s web site:

“Record voice samples for any contact in the address book. Just speak to dial the number. Open any application with your voice. So you can check your emails or start Google Maps by just saying it. And you can even surf to your favourite websites by assigning voice tags to your Safari bookmarks.The software uses a modern speech recognition algorithm which gives excellent results in real life situations.

The software works with all languages. It does not depend on a dictionary or vocabulary, but it stores your speech samples and links them to contacts, applications or bookmarks. When you’re on the go, VoiceDial lets you keep in touch even when your hands are full. It’s as easy as saying, “John Smith” or “Mail”. And you’ll be automatically notified of free updates via Installer.”

I hope Apple will address this issue before July. But if for some reason they don’t, we may be taking this route with Dawn’s iPhone (as long as we don’t have to schlep that big honkin’ microphone around…) However, we’ll wait for Apple to release the announced SDKs so that the folks at Makarama can port the app to run on factory iPhones. We’re not ready to hack ours… yet.