I've contacted Nuance to verify this and will update this article when I get a response. Before you get paranoid understand that only the names are uploaded. Ouch!Īlso, you should be aware that the app will upload the names in your contact list. You won't know what you're saying is not worth saying until after the apps tries to transcript it. The app will take what you've said, attempt to connect, if it can't it displays an error message and what you said is not saved for future translation, it's lost like like a whisper in the wind. If you walk into a store, for instance, where cell service sucks then anything you say to Dragon Dictation has a problem.
It's that 1% that always seems to get you. Your voice input is sent to servers at Nuance where it is converted into text and sent back to you. That 10% requires correction, and you actually have to concentrate, I believe you concentrate harder, to determine what needs correcting than you might by simply typing it out in the first place.Īnother thing about Dragon Dictation is that it requires Internet access to work. This is especially true for longer text input. Until the application gets use to your voice and how you say things, its accuracy is somewhat less than 99%, I’d say more like 90%, and it’s that 10% that keeps Dragon Dictation from solving all our texting ills. Nuance claims that Dragon Dictation can be 99% accurate. Watch the videos and read the literature and you’d think that Dragon Dictation is a lot simpler than it really is, and that you can now text while driving if you use Dragon Dictation to enter the text. The only part of my dreaming that is real is that Nuance, the makers of Dragon Dictation for iPhone, Dragon Naturally Speaking for the PC, and distributers of MacSpeech for the Mac, has a real shot at changing how we enter text on mobile devices, if Dragon Dictation is any indication, but it’s not there yet. Steve Jobs’ health problems vanished and he looked as vibrant as when he came back to the company he co-founded with Woz back in 1977.īirds sang, everyone played soccer, love, peace, and really good pizza was had by all. War and hunger became bad memories, we cruise through space just like in Star Trek, Microsoft suddenly became concerned less for world domination and Google, and more for human advancement and cooperation. Cool people would never be caught typing on their tablets or iPhone, they’d speak, it would listen, it would do. I visualized an Apple tablet device that responded to voice commands a quickly and as easily and one might click a mouse button. Still further, I dreamt of a world where keyboards no longer existed except in museums and in the dank, dark innards of an aging corporate America. People could, quite literally, dictate a letter and send it without ever touching the iPhone.
I envisioned Apple providing an API so that Dragon’s superior voice recognition software could be use to navigate menus on the iPhone just as MacSpeech does for the Mac. Texting while driving would be only marginally more dangerous than talking while driving instead of the attention sucking, therefor extremely dangerous action it is today, thus saving lives. I imagined the iPhone toting throngs busily chatting up their devices, sending long, elaborate, and heart felt emails and text messages to friends and loved ones with nothing more a few taps on the touch sensitive screen.
For free!Īt least, this was my thinking 10 minutes after installing Dragon Dictation on my iPhone. Let's make this extremely clear you say what you want, Dragon Dictation translates it to text. You can do this almost anywhere, at any time, for free. Dictate rough drafts of letters, emails, even instant messages as easily as pressing a record button. If you think about that for a moment you can begin to see the power of this one application. This week one such gem appeared and it was my initial opinion that this one app will do for smartphones, and for the iPhone in particular, what Apple has done to computing and the music business that is it will fundamentally change the way we do things.ĭragon Dictation is an application that takes your spoken words and turns them into text.
That may be, but if you have 100,000 plus applications available for a platform there are bound to be some absolute gems in the pile.
They claim that while they may not have the numbers of apps that the iTunes App Store holds what apps they do have are quality bits of code that device owners will want and find useful. Pundits are quick to point out that me-too smartphones makers are bringing or have brought apps to their devices. Even people who have a hard time explaining what an app is will tell you that it is the apps that set Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch apart from the competitors.