Dictate this! The App of the Week.
App of the week
For the last week. I’ve been playing with a very cool new app. In fact you might not believe it, but I’m writing this blog with it as we speak.
It’s from a company called Nuance. And it’s based on the Dragon voice recognition protocol available for computers.
The accuracy is ridiculously good. It allows me to speak to my phone and it immediately translates what I say into text. You can use it to write an e-mail, a text message, or yes, you guessed it, a blog.
It has a simple, friendly interface with few distractions. It has auto correction features in case it misses the words you spoke. It uploads your address book so that proper nouns and the names of people are spelled correctly.
My only complaint about the app is that it works better in short bursts rather than long sentences. That means rather than dictating this whole blog at once, I will stop after each sentence or two to make sure it got the information correct. The longer I speak, the better chance it will skip words or get whole sentences completely mangled.
The more I use it the better it gets. So far during this entire blog. I’ve only had to correct two words and they were understandable mistakes. Words that sounds so similar to each other, or combinations of words that sound similar. So I can understand. Very few dictation programs can tell the difference in context of the sentence you are speaking. Therefore you can frequently get phrases like I scream and ice creme confused. Surprisingly it even got those words correct a moment ago.
Once you have dictated what you want to say, and hit the done button, and checked to make sure it was accurate, you can send the text to a number of different places.
It can send text directly into a new e-mail. Or copy it to the clipboard. Or send it to the text application. However, the way it transfers to the text application, still leaves little to be desired. Rather than sending the text directly into a new message. It merely copies the text to the clipboard, and opens the text application. Then you must select who to send the text to and tap in the text bubble and paste the dictation in. Even though that adds a step, it’s still better than typing the text out yourself. Especially when driving.
And yes this entire blog was not only written with dictation software, but was written well I was driving through Los Angeles traffic. Pretty damn amazing. I love technology.
Oh, and the best part, it’s totally free.
Mac whisperer out.
Category: The Mac Whisperer
