Just to help you inch just a little bit closer to that cloak and dagger lifestyle, I’d like to offer 4 Windows Mobile downloads that you can use to transform your regular mobile phone into an honest-to-goodness cool spy gadget.

Cool Spy Gadget #1 – A Room Bug To Record Conversations

In many countries and in many situations, it may be illegal to record a conversation without the knowledge of those involved. This is at least true if the conversation is being transmitted over the phone. If this is illegal in your country, don’t do it! Otherwise, if you just happened to leave your cellphone laying around in a room where there just happens to be an interesting conversation going on, that’s not really your fault now, is it?

NoteM is a Windows Mobile app that is supposed to serve as a voice note-taking tool, but left recording in an inconspicuous place, it could pick up some very interesting conversations.

This software is a simple recorder, and it doesn’t do anything fancy like ftp the file to your web server or email the audio to you automatically, but if you install a 2GB or larger storage card in your SD (or micro-SD) slot, you’ll have plenty of storage to save hours of recorded audio without a problem. The screen on the left is before any recordings are created. Just press the red “record” button and walk away. Recordings are stored in MP3 format in whichever directory you choose.

Cool Spy Gadget #2 – See In The Dark With Sonar

It may seem like science fiction, or something you’d expect to see on Ghost Hunters, but with SonarCE you can transform your Windows mobile phone into your own personal sonar device. The way this application works is that it emits the sonar signal from the device speakers, and reads echo to the microphone. It’s pretty impressive, and according to the programmers it is accurate at, ” around 5-10 cm at distance of 10 m.”

During my own testing with an older model Cingular 8125 running Windows Mobile 5, I found that it was a little difficult to get used to, but what I really liked was the cool screen.

The one annoying thing about this mobile app is that it requires a little bit of tweaking in terms of scale. However, there’s an automatic “search offset” feature that goes through a cycle of pings and calibrates the device for you. The website features a useful setup guide that’ll help you at least get the sonar working to the point that when you move close to an object, you’ll notice the difference on the sonar display (even if you don’t really know anything about how sonar works).

Whether or not the tool would ever be very useful is debatable, but I suppose if you ever find yourself in a completely pitch-black room and you don’t want to crash into any objects, this cool little mobile app could help. Beyond that, it’ll at least be a very neat feature to show your friends and family how cool your phone is.

Cool Spy Gadget #3 – Disk Encryption Software

Every spy needs a safe place to store sensitive data, and the best way to store your critical files that you don’t want anyone tampering with is in a hidden, encrypted “virtual disk” that no one can find or access but you – with the appropriate key.

To accomplish this task, a neat free application called FreeOTFE4PDA will do the trick. The software supports a long list of encryption algorithms and supports various cypher modes and security tokens. Your volume will be created without a signature – virtually invisible to anyone looking for it.

Configuration is fairly simple, as you can see from the screens above – and it works well by simply using all of the default settings. However, for security experts who understand and are looking for a product that offers deeper security, the functionality is there. This is one of the best free applications out there for completely encrypting any data that you want to store and transport on your trusty mobile device. If you don’t understand data-encryption though, skip installing this app because you could make entire folders disappear without being able to retrieve them again.

Cool Spy Gadget #4 – Remote Video Streaming

Recently, I wrote about using VZOChat to integrate videoconferencing into your blog. One of the items in that article that I touched on was setting up the videoconference with your Windows Mobile device configured as a webcam, transmitting your end of the video while you talk to your blog visitor face to face.

However, another very cool use of this software is to convert your mobile device into a video and audio surveillance gadget. This may not be very practical over the cellular data line because first of all, you could rack up some crazy data use charges, and secondly the quality of the video won’t be that great (as you can see from my example in the blog article). With that said, you could configure your phone with VZOchat and then set it up with the camera pointed at the room that you want to monitor.

The software will pick up sound from the microphone, so you’ll be receiving and transmitting both. All you have to do is make sure your phone is connected to the Internet through your Wi-Fi network and that the VZOChat software is running (it doesn’t have to be connected yet).

Just make sure the software is configured on your phone to automatically accept incoming calls, as shown above. Then, go to another room or anywhere else where you have an Internet connection (it doesn’t have to be on the same home network), and go to your VZOchat account. Keep in mind that you’ll need two VZOchat accounts -  one account for your remote connection, and a different account for your cellphone. Go to the video call page for your cellphone profile, and you’ll see the call button as shown here.

The moment you select “Start videochat“, you’ll establish a connection with your remote mobile device that will trigger both the camera and the microphone to activate – recording everything that’s going on in the room and streaming it over the Internet directly to you. Here, I’ve set up my cellphone as a remote webcam in the living room to keep an eye on who keeps stealing the TV remote control. Looks like someone already stole it…

The screen you see above is what I saw on my PC across the property in our other building. I could keep my cellphone running in this room in order to watch and listen to everything that’s going on. With a cellphone just left lying around somewhere, no one would ever know that you’re using it as a surveillance device. Again – make sure that this sort of activity is legal in your area and in your situation!

All four of these gadgets offer some cool ways that you can transform your Windows Mobile device into a fun and exciting gadget that you can use for far more than just making phonecalls and checking your Facebook account. Do you know of any other cool Windows Mobile apps like these? Have you tried any yourself, and what do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credit : Dunechaser

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“Ten” a soft female voice answered.

“What’s our chance of survival?”

“Zero percent.”

Kirk smiled and said “Computer, increase the shield to maximum.” He sat on his chair on the bridge “and play me some Mozart.”

“Affirmative.”

Then the scene from my imaginary episode of Star Trek continues with a fierce space battle between the USS Enterprise and ten Romulan battleships while Mozart’s “Air In G” plays in the background.

Countless episodes of sci-fi movies shows us that one of the major dreams of humans is to be able to have a conversation with computers. Your Mac OS X has a great speech recognition technology that is overlooked by most of its users. And even if we are still far from what the sci-fi movies dream about, talking with your Mac could be a very fun thing to do.

The Figure of Speech

To enable the speech recognition ability and use speech commands on your Mac, the first thing you have to do is open the Speech menu from System Preferences.

Then you need to choose the Speech Recognition tab.

Turn the function on by choosing On on the Speakable Items radio button.

The next step would be to choose the sound source – the default is Internal Microphone. Then you would want to calibrate it.

You could change the Listening Key if you don’t want to use the default Esc key.

There are two options on how the computer should listen to you. If you don’t want to have “accidental” operation, choose Listen only while key is pressed radio button. If you want to have the nearest working environment to the USS Enterprise, choose Listen continuously with keyword and pick your favorite keyword.

To make sure that your Mac acknowledges your command, put the checkmark into Speak command acknowledgement option.

The Voice behind The Machine

We now come to the personal preferences part – which voice do you want to speak to you?  Personally, I like a girl’s voice as I consider my Mac to be a female. But there are many choices that Mac users could choose from the Text to Speech tab.

There are other options related to Speech that you can choose from this tab. My favorite is Speak selected text when the key is pressed. This way I can have my writing read to me as I can easily spot mistakes this way. Just don’t forget to choose the key combination.

But even without having this option checked, you still could have the text read to you by selecting any text then right-click on it and choose Speech –> Start Speaking. Please note that this right click option is not available for all applications.

The quality of the speech is still very “machine” and far from a human sound. But sometimes it is fun listening to your document instead of reading it.

The List of Mac Speech Commands

So, how would you know what command to say to your Mac? Click on the down arrow from the Speech Recognition Window and choose Open Speech Command Window. You’ll have a window with a list of commands available.

From my experiment I found out that these commands are easily editable. Just open the Speakable Items Folder (/User/Library/Speech/Speakable Items/) then rename the file(s). If you think that the “Minimize Speech Commands window” command is too long, just rename the corresponding file into something shorter, and then your Mac will understand the new command.

Please note that this feature will not work correctly in noisy environments since the noises will interfere with your spoken command.

Another annoyance is that sometimes the machine can be so stupid that you have to repeat a command several times.

But all in all, these speech recognition features of Mac OS X is another cool feature that Mac users should try.

As a fun bonus, try to say this command to your Mac: “tell me a joke” and share your thoughts and experiences using Mac speech commands using the comments below.

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Here’s an App that attempts to rectify the iPhone’s lack of voice dialing capability. It’s called Cactus Voice Dialer (iTunes Link) and it’s free in the App Store. To put it simply, Cactus listens to your commands, interprets them intuitively, and tries to find the right number in your contact list. The neat thing about it is that there’s almost no set-up whatsoever.

Many built-in voice calling systems require you to record a keyword for each contact or “train” the speech algorithm. Cactus uses a speech recognition system that doesn’t require any training at all. That system is PocketSphinx, a mobile version of the Sphinx recognition system developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

When you first bring up the App, it has a quick cheat sheet for command entries, a settings button, and a “Speak” key (visible on the right). Holding down that last key while giving your command should bring up the desired contact. For instance, If you say “Call John Doe” and John Doe is a contact on your phone, their name should appear immediately after that. If they have more than one phone number, Cactus will automatically click through and show you all of them. You can specify “Call John Doe’s Mobile” as well if you solely want to bring up your contact’s mobile number.

There are a number of options to choose from in the settings that relate directly to how much you trust the App to get the right person. The first setting allows Cactus to begin the call as soon as it determines the contact you want. I would recommend holding off on this option until you are more comfortable with the App. Next is the option to allow multiple results after a query. This is handy if you simply want to use Cactus to quickly find contacts. Last, there is an option to only bring up the primary number for each result (which could save some click-throughs).

Of course the key to any voice recognition system is accuracy. How well does it work? Well, after testing it with a number of different types of names, it seems to respond with a fair amount of accuracy. The settings let you meter your level of trust, so you can use it as voice calling or simply a voice-based contact book (which is mostly how I use it).

Cactus is a little on the “heavy” side for a free App. If you download a lot of Apps, you’ll notice that very few are above 1MB in size. Cactus Voice Dialer is 4.9MB. Presumably the voice recognition software is what takes up most of the space.

Tip: One little trick I’ve found helpful is to alter my voice commands slightly. The App suggests saying “Call” next to each contact’s name, but this seems to be completely unnecessary. Also, if you just want to quickly jump to a small group of names, you can say “John,” and all the Johns on your phone will appear. This is by far the most reliable way to call up names because as long as you don’t rush your pronunciation, which might be tempting for shorter names, you’ll almost always get your desired contact up on the results list.

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The main question I leave you with is this: Is voice dialing really necessary on the iPhone? If the recognition isn’t perfect and you just use it as a shortcut for your address book, is it really any faster than double-clicking the home button (presumably taking you to your favorite contacts)? I’m still not sure if I’m going to use this much in the long run.

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