We’ve seen a couple good hacks that allow you to use Siri and the iPhone 4S to control your Mac, but Vocal is the best and most feature-rich one we’ve seen yet, allowing you to use your iPhone 4S to control apps, perform searches, copy-and-paste text, control iTunes, lookup words and much, much more.
Vocal is a project put together by Matthew Roberts, who explains:
Vocal came essentially from playing with Siri on my new 4S as a sort of “novelty” as I just acquired the device, and since I use my Mac so much I wanted to see if I could write a Siri-like app for it. After looking around the only main competitor was the software from Nuance, but it was over 1GB to download and cost upwards of $50. Considering the 4S can already dictate text, I thought I could make a super simple app “for the masses”, I guess you could say.
On the iPhone 4S end of things, Vocal doesn’t do much more than pipe commands made with Siri dictation to your Mac through a WiFi connection, but it’s the Vocal software on the Mac side that impresses us so much. It’s shocking how much Vocal can do, almost as if someone gave Alfred voice control abilities.
