Version 2.2.0 finally released on Play Store!

I’m proud to announce, after more than four months, that the version 2.2.0 of Voice Control has been finally released on Play Store.

Main changes in this version are:

• The new “Tasker” actions that allows to execute tasks defined in the Takser application!
• The new experimental “voice activation” feature.
• The brand new and completely rewritten command parsing engine, that now allows to fully customize commands activation phrases and to dictate commands in more natural ways.
• Some changes in order to ensure that Voice Control works on Jelly Bean.

• Added a new action that will allows to execute tasks created in Tasker saying “Execute task <task name>”: this will allows to create any type of custom actions thanks to the powerful features of Tasker! (A big Thanks to Pent for his support needed for Tasker and Voice Control integration!)
• Added an option to set the accuracy threshold for commands interpretation.
• Added an experimental voice activation feature under the “Labs” options.
• Every command now can be activated without saying every needed information, and Voice Control will asks for them one by one.
• Commands with multiple information, like the “add event” action, now can be said in much natural way with all information at once.
• All commands now can be fully customized, including “sub commands”, for every accepted phrase (not only for the initial text), and variable informations supported by each commands can be added using the “+ variable” button on the virtual keyboard, that will allows to select the variable to add with some explanation about it scope among these supported by the command.
• Applied a work-around for a regression introduced with the new Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) that makes Voice Control crash due a problem with bold and italic texts.
• Fixed some typos and some missing translations.
• Applied some improvements on phone number handling for the “compose” action.
• Bluetooth headsets related reminders, announces and tones settings now apply also for wired headsets.
• Fixed a problem on unread messages detection and retrieval on some devices.
• The “listen to” action now will warn when trying to play a song with an unsupported player, in order to suggest to install one of supported music player from the Play Store when getting weird behaviors.
• The “listen to” action can now be executed saying “listen to album <album name>”, “listen to song <song name>” etc in order to avoid the result selection when generically saying “listen to <media name>”.
• If an action can be handled by multiple applications on the phone, now Voice Control will asks for which one to use, in order to avoid to use the on screen application selection of Android.
• Applied some improvements and optimization to the User Interface.
• Applied some improvements on the “on screen hint” help in order to identify which additional information is requested.
• Applied some general improvements on resources usage, in order to reduce Voice Control hangs and its battery/memory drain.
• Fixed some problems related to email settings in the test version.
• “Battery level” action now says if the battery is in charge.
• Applied some performance improvements on contact searching.
• Now if multiple actions have the same activation phrases with different informations, like “Start <application>” and “Start <tasker task>”, Voice Control will use the most appropriate interpreted command.
• Now is possible to quit from Voice Control while it is asking for a multiple results selection.
• Handled the new permission required on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean to read and write lost calls informations.
• Tried to apply a fix for audio loading problems on some devices where Voice Control crash on recognition starts.
• Fixed a bug on config screen opening caused by devices that don’t provide names for paired bluetooth devices.
• Fixed a problem on gmail account association work-flow that sometime was reopening the google access request page instead to return to the configuration screen.
• Voice Control will now check on startup if on the phone are installed both the Full and the Test version, asking to uninstall the Test version in order to prevent any possible conflict.
• Voice Control will now remember on first startup to reboot the phone to avoid most commons type of problems.
• In the Test version, Voice Control will now ask on first execution to install the free week trial license, in order to prevent user confusions regarding the manual trial license installation.

And there are many other bugfixes and improvements.

As most of you noticed, from this version has been dropped the embedded offline recognizer. I already explained this decision in a previous post, so I will not repeat the drop decision reasons here.

Now, what to expect from future version? Probably there will be a bunch of bug-fix release, as I’m pretty sure that new command parsing engine will needs for some “refining”. After, I will finally complete the third parts plugin support, that was postponed due the internal command parsing engine rewriting. There are also some plans for better UI usage improvements ans some new actions.

Bye and thanks to everyone that still support Voice Control,
Luca.