This is probably one of the easiest app reviews I’ll ever write. Nuance Communications’ Dragon Dictation app for the iPhone really only had to work to impress me. Dragon Dictation, which was released Dec. 7 and is currently available for free at the App Store, is a voice-to-text application that allows users to dictate texts, e-mails and notes.
If you haven’t heard of Nuance Communications, they’re primarily a provider of backend and white-labeled services. They power the kind speech technology used in brands such as the Amazon Kindle and the Ford SYNC. In the mobile space, their voice-to-text technology can be found in AT&T’s voicemail-to-text service, as well as on devices such as the Samsung Rogue.
When I say that Dragon Dictation only had to work to impress me, I say that because accuracy is a rarity for most of these applications. For example, a few of my contacts still reach me through my Google Voice number, and that brand of voicemail-to-text transcription more often reads like post-modern poetry than English. In the past, I’ve also tried SpinVox, with similarly lackluster results (that was a while ago, and I never went back, so I have no idea how much has improved).
Given that history, imagine my surprise when I spoke into the Nuance app and found that it nailed a paragraph-long e-mail. The app, which is available for free for a limited time, is rather simple. There’s a button for recording whatever it is you want to say. When you’re through, you can choose whether to populate a text or e-mail message or else copy directly to the iPhone’s clipboard.
While I probably won’t use this app for sending many e-mails or texts on the fly (the extra click to use your text seems a bit laborious), the app works great for taking notes that I want to print later. And while I can see the argument that this kind of application might make texting safe for drivers, there’s still too much screen touching for it to be safe while you’re doing 65 mph.
My only real complaint with the app is that it processes the text via the cloud. In other words, it takes what you’ve said, sends it via a connection (3G or Wi-Fi), and then spits back the results. For longer messages, this can take a while, depending on your connection, and if you don’t have a connection and you just want to dictate a note, you’re out of luck.
Perhaps my biggest gripe isn’t with Nuance, but with Apple for not integrating Nuance’s technology onto the iPhone in the first place. Deep integration of this kind of technology with the iPhone’s core text and e-mail functions would have been a home run. Instead, we got Voice Control for the iPhone, which at its best is mildly entertaining and at its worst, entirely useless.