We are removing our speech recognition app Vocalia from the App Store.
It was no easy decision. If you didn’t know it, Vocalia was our first iPhone app that we released back in 2008, just after creating our company. Before that, we were busy only with Mac apps.
When Apple opened the App Store to third-party developers in July 2008, allowing to create native apps for iPhone, we seized that opportunity and came up with an app that was both innovative and useful. The goal of Vocalia was to quickly access contacts, songs, or internet bookmarks with speech recognition. It was a challenge for us because the first iPhone had very limited computation power, and we needed to optimize and quickly train the speech recognizer to be ready as soon as possible after App Store launch. Vocalia was released a few months later, on September 27, 2008. At that time, we could boast of being among the very first Belgian companies to storm Apple’s digital shop. And it was the first app to provide speech recognition in 6 languages, before Apple’s own “voice commands” in iPhone 3GS. We were really proud of that!
While it received positive feedback over the years , we just don’t have enough resources to further develop it these days. We aim at making great apps, therefore we need to focus and we prefer to remove it rather than to further abandon it on the store. Existing users can keep it on their iPhone or redownload it as long as it’s compatible with their version of iOS, but new users won’t be able to purchase it from us anymore.
Note that we are still thinking of a possible relaunch of Vocalia in the future, if we come up with new concept that makes sense, so if you have further feedback or ideas, please let us know.
Thank you for your understanding.
Creaceed Team
