Butterball Cookbook Plus supports voice commands and includes an oversize "preparation mode" for easy reading at a distance.

Cooking a Thanksgiving feast can be a messy affair, something to think about if you're relying on your iPhone or iPad for recipe assistance. When the time comes to swipe pages, start a timer, or the like, are you really going to use that Crisco/flour/pumpkin-covered finger?

With the Butterball Cookbook Plus app, you won't have to. It responds to various voice commands, meaning you can turn pages and more just by speaking.

The app features a couple hundred recipes, many of them focused on Thanksgiving and turkeys, natch, but also in categories like Healthy Lifestyle, Kid-Friendly, and Outdoor Cooking. Butterball will offer additional free recipe packs each month, two of which (October and November) are already available for download.

Like any good cooking app, this one lets you add favorite recipes to... [Read more]

The Google app's newly enhanced voice-powered search can work wonders, and it's even better on a jailbroken iPhone.

I'll catch some flak for this, but I still like Siri.

In fact, I find it extremely useful for things like setting reminders and sending text messages hands-free. It's not perfect, but neither is it as useless as many people seem to think.

That said, Google's newly updated Voice Search is all kinds of awesome. It's blazing-fast, amazingly accurate, and in many ways just plain smarter than Siri. Use it a few times and you'll immediately start wishing you could ditch Siri for it -- or, at the very least, make it as push-button accessible.

You can -- if you're willing to jailbreak your iPhone. Cydia tweak NowNow lets you invoke Google's Voice Search via any number of shortcuts, including a triple-press of the Home button or double-tap of the lock-screen clock. It also gives owners of older iPhones -- those that don't have Siri at all -- a slick voice-search capability.

Here's a video that shows NowNow in action:

... [Read more]