Use Your Voice To Take The Perfect Portrait With VoiceSnap For iOS

VoiceSnap ($1.99) by Moca Apps LLC is an app to make taking self portraits and group photos easier than ever before. With VoiceSnap, your voice will help you take the perfect picture.

I know we’ve all been there — whether we want to take that awesome selfie to send to friends or family, but it gets a bit difficult to do when we have to still use our hand to press the button, and potentially mess up our perfect pose. Or those times when you are with a group of people, and want to take a group photo, but don’t want to exclude anyone. With VoiceSnap, it’s never been easier to do all of these, and more, with just your voice.

VoiceSnap features a clean and elegant interface that fits in well with the iOS 7 aesthetics that we’ve grown accustomed to. The entire screen is the viewfinder, and you will have a translucent bar at the bottom that is home to the shutter button (you can still use it like a normal camera) and gear icon for settings. Standard camera controls (flash and front and rear camera toggle) are found at the top corners, although they may be a bit hard to spot at first due to the light iconography. I found VoiceSnap to be very simple and intuitive to use, making it a great little app for the task.

By default, VoiceSnap launches into the camera view, of course. In order to take a photo with the voice command, you just need to say, “Take a picture,” after giving it permission to access your microphone, of course. I tested this out with numerous photos, and found it to be very good at picking up my voice when I talk at an average volume, but don’t expect it to hear you if your voice is a bit more muted, or try to whisper to it. After you say the command, it will give you about two seconds before it snaps the photo, just so you can prepare yourself after triggering it. You can also have the app take a photo automatically after a certain time interval by using the timer at the top.

Unfortunately, from what I noticed, the only command that makes the app take a photo is “Take a picture.” You can’t change it to something else, which I thought was a bit annoying. The traditional “Cheese!” didn’t work either, as I just stood there and nothing happened. I think it would be nice if the app had multiple phrases that could trigger the capture of the shot — perhaps in the future.

Another option, aside from just pressing the button, is to use Remote Snap. This feature allows the device to pair to a non-iOS Bluetooth device, so you can still use your voice from afar, or even just volume buttons. You can connect to another iOS device for the Remote Snap feature as well.

Once you’ve taken some photos with VoiceSnap, you can view the images you’ve taken by just sliding the translucent bar upwards. These images will be saved here in VoiceSnap’s gallery even if you delete them from the Camera Roll. Tapping on one of your images will bring it up in full screen, and you can share it through the iOS 7 Share Sheet, open it in a third-party app, or delete it from VoiceSnap.

The settings in VoiceSnap (accessed from the cog button) allow you to customize your experience with the app even more. You can choose to have a square crop on by default, a grid for making sure your images are level, burst (off, two, or three images at once), and activate Remote Snap. Various settings include having geolocation information, auto save, delete on save, timer speech, and automatically changing the theme during day and night.

I’ve been enjoying Voice Snap so far, as it’s fast, slick, and makes it easy to take portraits and group shots with your iPhone or iPad. I do wish that the app had more than one phrase used to trigger capturing an image, though, because “Take a picture” seems a bit long, when you could use something short and traditional like “Cheese.” Still, VoiceSnap is a slick app that is handy to have around when you need it.

I recommend VoiceSnap if you’ve been in search of a camera app that allows you to just capture a photo with just your voice. You can find it on the App Store as a universal download for $1.99.