The BGM Review – Dragon Dictation for iPhone

One of the most desired things for the iPhone platform to date has been voice to text translations. Imagine being able to speak to your iPhone and have your joyful words magically transformed into text that it is ready to email, Tweet or save to a note.
Dragon Dictation trying to decipher this paragraph...

Well, welcome to the future, today! Dragon Dictation is now available (for a limited time, it is free) in the App Store. While it isn't perfect, it is surprisingly robust and good at what it does.

Simply by starting the app and pressing the red button, you can begin to speak (slowly is recommended) and when you're finished your words are displayed in a text field that is editable in case you see a typo or want to amend something. After you are satisfied with the results, you can then choose to copy the text to the clipboard or send it via email or sms. By utilizing the clipboard, you can then save it to a note or even paste it into Facebook or Twitter.

About the only downsides I noticed were:

  • When you send your text to an SMS, you have to paste it into the body, whereas for email it autofills. This is, however, a limitation of the iPhone OS so we won't hold that against the app too much.
  • You must have a network connection in order for the app to transcribe your text
  • One other caveat: when you launch the app, it asks you for permission to copy the names of your contacts to the developers server, ostensibly to make the recognition of names more accurate. If you feel uncomfortable exposing that information, you might want to reconsider installing the app or possibly removing your contacts and re-synching them after running the app for the first time.

    Overall it's a great first effort, but we'll keep our fingers crossed for a more feature rich version in the near future - maybe for a few bucks more?

    Dragon Dictation is available for free (as of December 9th 2009) on the iPhone App Store.

    Product Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dragon-dictation/id341446764?mt=8

    BGM Score

    • ★★★★☆

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