MyCaption app for BlackBerry: free your thumbs

MyCaption, a member of the BlackBerry Alliance, introduced on Tuesday a new way BlackBerry users can work with e-mails on their smartphones: by speaking.

Actually, this is not exactly a breakthrough, as voice recognition technology has been out there for a long time and can be found in the Voice Command or Voice Dialing features of many smartphones. However, this seems to be the first time you can use it for more than simple sentences, such as, "Call Johnny at the office."

MyCaption claims that its new application is sophisticated enough that people can compose, forward, or reply to e-mails by speaking comfortably into the phone. You then will have the option to preview the texts before actually sending them off. The application can work with multiple e-mail accounts.

MyCaption currently works on the BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, and 8800. For a limited time, it's available to download as a free trial.;this lets you send 10 messages for free. After that, according to the company's Web site, you can either pay $1 for each message or pay $10/month to send unlimited messages of 15 seconds in length, or fewer. Even when you opt for the monthly plan, you still have to pay $.50 per message for messages that are longer than 15 seconds. The longest message the application can process is 3 minutes.

This seems like a very useful tool that will free your thumbs from the little keyboard. More importantly, now you can potentially talk to a business partner over the phone and then send him the transcript of the conversation in an e-mail. Maybe this will bring a whole new meaning to the term "verbal contract." Who says talking is not writing in black and white?