If you're familiar with Dragon Naturally Speaking on the PC, you'll know just how amazing the software's speech recognition facilities are. Unfortunately, smartphones are not yet in a position to handle that much processing. Despite that obvious limitation, Nuance's Dragon Dictation for iPhone manages to work its magic impressively.
The iPhone version of the app is designed to ease your fingers from typing duress when making emails, texts and notes. Available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, it works surprisingly well (at least for English, since I can't speak the other languages), with very few words during each message I dictated having been processed incorrectly.
Aside from that, Dragon Dictation is also much simpler to put to action than the desktop versions. Once downloaded, there's no need to train it in your speaking voice. Just launch the app, tap the screen to dictate and speak your piece -- words appear a couple of seconds after you say them.
Nuance claims that the app lets you compose text five times faster than typing on the iPhone's onscreen keyboard. Given the small size of those keys, it's tough to argue otherwise. Do note that the app occasionally crashes, which can be grating when you're in the middle of dictating a long message. There's no auto-save either, so you'll need to redo everything from scratch.
Over time, I have a feeling Dragon Dictation will be a regular fixture on my iPhone. While it's limited in function, it does its one job -- taking my dictations -- very well. Plus, it's free, so there's really no room to complain.
[Dragon Dictation]
In the movies, all you had to do to get your futuristic computer to perform tasks is give it a command in plain language. I really thought we were still years out from that, but I'm happy to be proven wrong by Siri, an AI-based voice-recognition app for the iPhone.
Google's voice transcription sounds great in theory. The application, though, is just one brain cell short of crappy. I totally expected the new software to perform the same way. Fortunately, it's a lot more sophisticated than that. A whole lot more, in fact.
Siri's voice recognition has it roots from SRI, under a research project partly funded by Darpa. The company behind the app consisted of members of the research team who went their own way in 2007, setting out to develop a virtual personal assistant. This new iPhone app is one of the fruits of that effort.
The current version only integrates 20 web information services (including Yelp, CitySearch and OpenTable), although they do have an available API that should help see that grow in the future. Early testing is ridiculously impressive, to the point that we're suspecting there's a physical person listening to our questions and manually finding the answers. Yep, it's that good.
Want to find a Persian restaurant in your vicinity? Want to book a table for Thursday next week? Looking for a three-star hotel in a city you're visiting? Tell it and it will do the deed with scary accuracy.
The best part? Siri is totally free. According to the company, they make their money on the backend, taking affiliate commission for the products and services they send you to. It's available for download from the App Store now, although the current version is strictly for iPhone 3GS users (it uses a lot of processing power).
[Siri Website]
