Dragon Voice Dictation on iPhone
I am a big fan of the voice recognition software. I use Nuance's Dragon Dictate on the PC and MacSpeech Dictate on my Mac. I was very pleased to see that Nuance, the developer of the Dragon engine, has released a Dragon Dictate iPhone app. For now, at least, it is free. I immediately downloaded and tried it out. Indeed, this post was written using it.
With no training whatsoever, the application immediately began recognizing my speech. This application does not perform the speech recognition on your iPhone but instead sends the voice file to the Dragon servers which do the heavy lifting and then send it back. It is all rather seamless. However, in order to work, you must be on a wi-fi or internet connection.
The only frustration is that it only works in short bursts. After two or three sentences, it will stop, send the voice file to the Nuance servers, processes your blurb, then be available for you to resume dictation. It also doesn't like swear words, as discovered by Andy Ihnatko.
If you've ever been curious about dictation software, go download it now.
David Sparks
The license agreement requires your consent to upload your contacts to their servers. I presume this is to help with the speech recognition but be warned.
Reader Comments (2)
I'd love to give it a go, but of course, it's not available in the Canadian store. Why am I not surprised?
You are correct about their use of the contacts, David. They say they are only taking the names - not the actual contact info - and they are using them to assist with recognizing names.
Nuance responded to the criticism thusly: "Some people have expressed concern about what the new Dragon Dictation for the iPhone application does with your contact information. As you may have experienced already, Dragon Dictation for the iPhone goes through your contact list on your iPhone and uploads the names to our server. We do this for a pretty simple reason: we found that people are often dictating names from their address book and expect the names to be recognized. We take this information and create an anonymous user profile for your device that understands what names are likely to dictate into a document. It's important to note that we only upload the names, not the e-mail addresses, phone numbers or any other personally identifying information from your contacts."
You can read the full response here: http://blog.dragonmobileapps.com/2009/12/what-dragon-dictation-for-iphone-does.html