I have had Dragon Dictation on my Iphone for about a week now and have started to use it more and more. Dragon Dictation is made by Nuance Communication which also created Dragon Naturally Speaking, Jott Assistant, Jott for Salesforce and MacSpeech among other products. Nuance Communication is actually fairly new to the Apple market, they started as a PC product with Dragon Naturally Speaking. They launched Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search shortly after the Iphone came out. In February 2010 they purchased MacSpeech. I downloaded Dragon Dictation for the Iphone, because I was looking for a way to put text into the Iphone without having to use the keyboard.
Dragon Dictation fits my need very well. The first time you open the application up, it will ask you for permission to scan your address book for names. If you give it permission it will remember the names only, no addresses or phone number. If you change your mind later, you can go in settings and revoke the permission. While in the settings menu, you can also decide if you want to have Dragon Dictate automatically recognize the end of sentences which is how it is by default. If you do it manually you have to say period at the end of each sentence, which does take some getting use too. Dragon Dictation also recognizes other common punctuation, such as commas, question marks, and the at sign just to name a few. It also recognizes commands such as new paragraph and new line. It works best in a quiet room or by using headphones with a microphone. You can do it by using the Iphone internal microphone, but the results are not as good. You want to speak clearly and in your normal voice, it will learn from you overtime. I found it works best when you speak in short bites. Then stop let it translate and then dictate some more. It does not like non dictionary words, such as Boxee, which became Boxy. I did notice that the first time I used the word Mac, it interpreted it as Max, but after I corrected it the next time I said the word it interpreted it correctly. If you get an error, there are a couple of ways to correct it. The first is too highlight the word that is wrong and in a drop down menu it will give some possible substitutions. The second is to use the keyboard that comes with the program and correct it that way. Finally you can highlight the word or phrase and record right over it with the correction.
Once you have done the dictation, you have the option of sending it directly to Twitter or Facebook from with in the application. It does have the option of emailing or texting the information, however you have to enter the email or text address in manually. Finally you can copy what your results and paste them into any other Iphone application you want. It would be nice if this application was integrated right within the Iphone , so that you could use the capability within any application. Until that becomes available, this maybe the next best thing. Dragon Dictation is free and is available for both the Iphone and the Ipad.
Yeah I agree, Dragon Dictation is great, although not quite as good as the desktop counterpart which is almost perfect. Dragon Dictation still makes quite a few errors and it isn’t as easy to fix them as the PC version where each word comes up with a whole list of similar sounding words if you want to fix them.
The last line says it all, they really need to integrate it into the iPhone so it can be used anywhere easily. Maybe part of the keyboard so you either toggle or hold down a record button. I don’t really see it happening with the app store version due to Apple’s strict policies, but a jailbroken app would be entirely possible.