Inc Magazine. - December 2011/January 2012

SLIDE SHOWS Plug in and present

Creating a great PowerPoint presentation is no easy feat. These new plug-ins can make the process a lot simpler. —A.B.

TECH TRENDS JOHN BRANDON

At Your Service
The skinny on virtual assistants

LIVELOOP

This plug-in lets an unlimited number of people edit a slide show in PowerPoint at the same time. After installing it, click a button to upload a presentation to your company’s server or LiveLoop’s cloud server, then invite collaborators. You can see which people are editing slides and chat with them. Changes appear in real time. COST: Free for three saved presentations or $9 a month for unlimited presentations

When I asked Siri to find an Italian restaurant in Minneapolis, it pulled up a number of options from Yelp.

VISUALBEE Not a natural at slide-show design? VisualBee can help. After downloading the plug-in, create a PowerPoint presentation, adding text, photos, graphs, tables, and graphics. Then click the VisualBee icon in your PowerPoint ribbon to browse through a gallery of 150 templates. When you select one, VisualBee will style your slide show accordingly, placing things in the corresponding layout and adding the right colors and fonts. COST: Free for a choice of 50 templates, then starting at $9.90 a month for more design options

I got a lot of work done during a recent
road trip, thanks to my new assistant. As I
drove, she added some meetings to my cal-
endar, took an e-mail dictation, and found
some restaurant options for dinner. She has
a great sense of humor. When I jokingly
told her I loved her, she responded, “I bet
you say that to all of your Apple products.”
As you probably guessed, my new
assistant is Siri, the voice-command sys-
tem built into Apple’s iPhone 4S. To see
how the feature stacks up against other
voice-recognition systems, I compared it
with Vlingo, a free app for Android
phones, BlackBerrys, and iPhones.

Using Siri is a cinch. Hold the iPhone up to your ear, or press and release the Home button. Then speak your command. Siri takes you through step-by-step directions to complete its assigned tasks. Say “Send a text message to Jim,” for example, and it will prompt you to speak the subject line and message, then say “send.” During my tests, Siri took dictation for texts and e-mails accurately most of the time but got tripped up by some unusual words and proper names.

You can also use Siri to send reminders to yourself. I asked it to “Remind me to send a message to my editor when I leave work,” and a note popped up on my phone when I left the office. I also used it to add meetings to my phone’s calendar, play music, check stock quotes, and dial up Face Time chats.

Siri can search for things on Google, Wikipedia, and Yelp, as well. When I asked it to find an Italian restaurant in Minneapolis, it pulled up a number of options from Yelp, along with a Google map. I asked Siri, “Who is the founder of Zynga?” and it produced Google search results for Mark Pincus.

The system has a few drawbacks. It can read text messages but not e-mails, and you can’t use it to add or edit phone contacts. Also, instead of speaking directions, it displays a map on your phone.

Perhaps the biggest drawback: Siri works with a limited number of third-party apps. That’s where Vlingo excels. I tested the app on the Samsung Galaxy S II, an Android smartphone. To get started, I opened the app and hit Speak It. To post a status update on my Facebook page, I said “status update,” and a list of social networks popped up. I chose Facebook, dictated the update, and clicked an icon to post it. To research hotels for an upcoming vacation, I said “trip to Chicago,” and Vlingo opened the Kayak app on my phone. (The destination field was already filled in, but I had to type in the rest of the information.) Another great feature: If you are using a BlackBerry or Android phone, Vlingo can read incoming texts and e-mails automatically. The app read incoming messages accurately, but the ones I dictated contained more errors than with Siri. Another downside: Vlingo doesn’t send location-based reminders.

My verdict? If you’re mostly interested in dictation, Siri is great. If you need a voice-recognition system that works well with other mobile apps, Vlingo is the way to go. But don’t worry, Siri: I still love you.