Posted on 12/08/2009 10:34:48 AM PST by Star Traveler
by Mel Martin
on Dec 8th 2009 at 12:00AM
Put this into the 'I didn't think they could ever get this to work on an iPhone' category.
I'm talking about Dragon Dictation [iTunes link] from Nuance, the developers of the very popular Dragon Naturally Speaking for the PC. Nuance also provides the speech recognition engine for MacSpeech Dictate on the Mac platform.
To dictate on the iPhone you just launch the app, press the record button, and start talking. Your dictation can be a brief sentence, or a much longer treatise. Once the text has been created from your speech, it's possible to email it, send it as a text message, or put the result in your clipboard. After recording your message, you can edit the resulting text before you send it off for others to read.
It's pretty slick! When you record your message, it is quickly transmitted to Nuance servers where a speech recognition algorithm is run against your data. The resulting text is returned to your iPhone very quickly; my informal benchmarks showed that it took about a second for text to be processed on a Wi-Fi network, and less than 5 seconds over 3G. You'll need a data connection for the app to work, but having this speech-to-text capability is going to be very important to a lot of people, who will find all sorts of uses for it.
I tested the app for about a week and found the accuracy to be very good. Accuracy diminishes if you are in a very noisy environment, as I found when I tried some dictation while being driven down the interstate. There were a few errors, but they were easy to correct. To add punctuation to your text, you can say 'period', 'question mark', or 'new paragraph,' and Dragon Dictation adds the appropriate punctuation.
Since your dictation goes out over the internet for processing, I asked Nuance about security. Their reply was as follows:
"Search queries and dictation requests are transcribed by fully automated speech recognition software, without the use of humans. Data is uploaded and collected in order to improve performance for individual users, and to improve the general performance of the system.
All speech recognition requests and associated data are processed in data centers in the U.S. that meet stringent security and privacy standards; these are the same standards that we use for processing private information in other areas of our business."
How much will this capability cost? Nothing. For a limited time Dragon Dictation is absolutely free, but at some point there will be a charge for it. I spoke to Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager for Nuance Mobile, and he said they see all sorts of specialized applications of this technology, such as in the legal and medical professions. The app has gone live and is available now.
Talk-to-text on your iPhone... [it’s free for now...]
bttt
can’t wait for a universal translator. So you can take it around the world and talk to anyone
Talk to text? WTF?
Why not just press the call button and talk to an actual person on the other end?
what? are you serious? no one would ever use a phone to TALK on!
i’m guilty of too much text. by the middle of the month they’ll quit telling me how many messages i sent/ received and just tells me how much i text in MB.
bookmark
Why not just press the call button and talk to an actual person on the other end?
Ummmm..., gotta think like a person who has an iPhone. That person knows that they've got a mini-computer in their hands, and it's not just "phone stuff" that they're doing.
I may be wanting to document something to put down later. Instead of transcribing it from my "voice message" (which I could do, too...), I'll "transcribe it" ready to put into notes for future reference.
Another thing, too..., if I want to add a address book card, but I don't have the time right now, I can speak into this, making the text-note that I want, so that when I've got time to update my address book, I can just copy and paste straight to the address book... :-)
There are plenty of uses for this one. I'm sure it's going to be quite successful.
I’m sure it will be successful. Guess I’ll just get walked into more than usual at the mall because people can’t take their heads out of their phones long enough to see where they are walking.
Dragon software ran quite well on the 250 mh PCs of 1977 or thereabouts and an Iphone simply has to have at least that much compute power and storage. There is no reason for Dragon software to be a web application; it ought to run on the Iphone without anybody but the user being involved.
The univeral translator is one of the apps that google has coming down the line.
The one caveat is that if it like existing Dragon products it is quicker to type than it is to speak after you do the corrections.
The one caveat is that if it like existing Dragon products it is quicker to type than it is to speak after you do the corrections.
I just downloaded it and tried it out. It works great and didn't make one mistake.
The first sentence that I did was a typical one that you type... LOL... "Now is the time for..." you know the rest...
And then the second sentence I did was a narrative that I just made up on the spot and kept speaking into it. It didn't do punctuation, but I didn't expect it to. It did all the words just right. I was speaking in a deliberate and slow manner though and trying to pronounce my words clearly. I suppose that makes a difference too.
BUT, this is absolutely great! Y'all try it out... :-)
There is no reason for Dragon software to be a web application; it ought to run on the Iphone without anybody but the user being involved.
Well, at the beginning of the iPhone (a couple of years back) they did have the "web apps" to start with. But, that's not what the "apps" are about right now.
Now..., while an app may access some other site, it's not technically a "web app", which is different from these current apps on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
I just wanted to make that distinction that this is not a web app (as Apple was using before).
The one caveat is that if it like existing Dragon products it is quicker to type than it is to speak after you do the corrections.
I have tried several more times and this last time I did a name, address, city and zip code. It did it all in sequence but not one word was wrong, not the address, not the name, no the zip code or anything.
This is quite good!
I’m sure it will be successful.
Well, I can tell you right now, this one is going to be great! It works wonderfully, and is very accurate.
Just got this, awesome!!!!!
My question is about Tethering (using the iphone) to connect my laptop to the internet when traveling..
I have heard so many things yes/no/cant/wont work/broke phone, etc... any advice? Maybe you can point me to a website that has good solid instructions?
Thanks!
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