I had been using Vlingo on-and-off for the better part of two years on my iPhone, and with the company recently updating their app to allow E-Mail and SMS functionality for free, have been using it for most of my texting. With the craze over Siri for iPhone, it got me to thinking if there was a way to use Vlingo as a complete (more or less) Siri alternative to update both my Calendar app and my task management app (currently, I'm using Appigo's Todo with a free Toodledo account).

Luckily, there is a way to do both using Vlingo.

Updating your Calendar with Vlingo (Google Calendar)

I live on Google Apps for kenchernoff.com, so I've set up my E-Mail and Calendar accounts using Google Sync to push to my native Mail and Calendar apps. I've discovered an app called EventBot, which accesses your Google Calendar account and assigns a unique e-mail address that you can send event details to. Simply create a new contact on your phone (ie. Calendar or Google Calendar), and assign the E-Mail address that EventBot gives you as this contact's primary e-mail address. After that, simply go into Vlingo, and say "E-Mail Calendar, subject [event details here]". Voila, you should have a new event created in your Calendar in seconds!

Updating Task Manager using Todo, Toodledo, and Vlingo

Toodledo offers an E-Mail option out-of-the-box to update your account. Just go into your account settings and find the unique E-Mail address for your account, and set up a new contact on your phone using this address (I call mine Task Manager). Vlingo will take care of the rest.

As an added bonus, Vlingo's latest update offers up automatic silence detection, so you don't even need to tell the app to stop listening and process your speech. I can honestly say with the most recent update, I have absolute no desire to have Siri on my phone, Vlingo pretty much does it all!