Voice-to-Text: There's Now an App for That
Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 1:04AM Dragon Dictation is a new iPhone app. It's a straight-forward voice recognition application from Nuance, the same company that makes Dragon NaturallySpeaking for desktop computers. Simply launch the app and tap the record button. Speak into the microphone. Tap Done when finished and Dragon Dictation sends your audio to their servers for processing. Within seconds, the servers send back the text created from your speech.
You will need to say punctuation marks you want to include, like "period" and "comma." In my testing I found that Dragon Dictation made fewer errors than I expected. It's easy to tap the keyboard icon to correct the text. After the text is the way you like it, you'll probably send it to the clipboard so you can paste it into any application. There's also the option to start an email message with the text or to send as a text message.
Voice-to-text is an exciting use for a handheld, particularly for students learning to write or those with writing or typing challenges. Unfortunately, Dragon Dictation will not install on an iPod touch. I see no reason why an iPod touch with a microphone attachment can't run this app, so I hope Nuance Communications updates the software to install on iPods soon. In the meantime, those with iPhones can find lots of uses for Dragon Dictation, especially since the app is free of charge (for a limited time).
Update: Dragon Dictation now works on iPod touch. You will need a microphone since iPod touch does not have one built-in.
Reader Comments (4)
Sadly, this app is only available in the US. Good thing I have accounts in both Canada and the US. Not sure why this one is region specific.
It's so strange that it's only a U.S. app. I'm imagining when developers submit to the App Store, they have a list of checkboxes, and some just decide to check "U.S. Only" and "iPhone Only" just to have something checkmarked...
I sure it's more complicated than that and that there are reasons, but it is sad when a great app isn't available to you.
Wow! What an outstanding app! Like you said, Tony, it is surprisingly accurate. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Tony - well I grabbed this one while it was still free - so many uses for my learning support students. But I haven't tried to install it on our iPod touch's yet - guess I won't bother for a while - but thanks for the info on Nuance's response! Cheers.