About Us

We started Vlingo in 2006 with big ideas and small resources. Our founders, John Nguyen (an MIT nerd and former Joust Video Game Champion) and Mike Phillips (a speech geek from Carnegie Mellon) had what was then a crazy idea: what if you could just “tell your phone what do by speaking to it?”  It was an idea for a revolutionary Voice User Interface for mobile—a way to “turn your words into actions.”

As we were on the dawn of the rise of ever more capable Smart Phones, our realization was that these feature rich computers in our pockets—capable of everything from surfing the web to email to social networking and e-commerce  and more, all shared one thing in common: they have a constrained User Interface. But, they all have microphones, so why not just use voice as the UI? So great idea, but also a great technical challenge. At the time, the “conventional  wisdom” was that the technology just didn’t exist to do this type of “unconstrained speech recognition.” In fact in 2006 and 2007 our competitors were saying it was impossible to do this with computers and the few attempts in the market to do a mobile voice UI actually used humans to transcribe what you were saying. Well, John and Mike had been working on this problem for some time, using the power of the web and cloud computing to move the speech recognition off of the device and into the cloud, and we launched our first products in early 2008. From there it’s been the classic “David vs. Goliath” story. Our success didn’t take long to catch one of our competitor’s attention.  We were flattered when Google launched its own mobile voice UI product in late 2008. We couldn’t hope for better validation from such a great company. Competitively, of course, Google has a few more resources than Vlingo. Oh well, they say a great competitor makes your own products better, and we think we’re holding our own based on our ability to exclusively focus our business on the mobile market and move with the speed of a start-up. This has allowed us to keep what we hope is an innovation lead—but don’t take our word for it—check out the reviews on the Android market. Better yet, with millions of mobile users having downloaded Vlingo, you probably know someone who has our product, so ask them what they think.”