Recently I purchased the Macspeech Dictate voice recognition software. As happy as I have been with it, I downloaded a free iPhone app this week that has me just about as excited as the Dictate software did when I first started using it.
The Dragon Dictation app from Nuance will give you voice-to-text translation that is at least as good as Dictate, and you don’t even have to train the software. I have been using a few of the voice recorder apps for iPhone to capture notes to myself during the day, but the fact is that I often don’t get around to transcribing them or even listening to them ‘later’. With Dragon Dictation I can’t voice type directly into an email but I can copy to clipboard, which adds another step but at least is a pretty seamless way to go from talking to digital content, whether I’m pasting into an email or the WordPress for iPhone app.
In addition to the translation accuracy, I’m impressed with the speed at which the voice translation is rendered on the device through Nuance’s computers via Wi-Fi, even though I live in Indonesia. You apparently can also use a cellular connection but I haven’t yet used it in this way. If I am near a hotspot the whole thing works as well as I could want. Corrections can be made via a pop-up keyboard, and you do have to speak punctuation. All in all it’s an amazing app, and in a way even more useful than voice recognition typing software on a desktop, as when you are on the go typing is pretty much impossible. Now you have a way to capture ideas as fast as you can speak them, without the burden of going back later to transcribe audio.
