It’s since last week that version 2.0.2 of the speech recognition application Dragon dictation appeared on the American App Store and now supports French. As a reminder, this application, offered free of charge by its editor and developer Nuance Communications, allows you to instantly transcribe a text that you dictate orally. Subsequently, the result can be easily sent by text or e-mail. What about its reliability? Belgium-iPhone tested it for you.
First of all, Dragon dictation is only available for download at the moment on the US App Store. You will need to create an additional account for this to have the chance to download it.
Then, the application requires a data connection because it will use the Internet to transmit "the given" voice transcribe in text. You will therefore either have to have a data connection from your operator or simply use a Wi-Fi connection which also provides much faster results!
When you launch the voice recognition application for the first time, a wizard will ask you whether or not to send your contacts to the Nuance Communications server. According to the description of this request, this will allow the application to better recognize the names of your contacts during transcription. The company says we can send them this precious data “With confidence and security”, it will therefore be necessary to stick to their possible goodwill if you wish to do so …
Then, it will be necessary to configure the application by choosing its language among those proposed (German, English US and UK, and French), to choose if you want the application to recognize the names of your contacts, and also interact with social networks Facebook and Twitter.
When everything is set up, you can finally start recognizing and transcribing your voice into text.
the writing of Belgium-iPhone, we chose six sentences to transcribe, here are the results:
1. “My 2pm meeting is canceled. So I stay at the office this afternoon ”. Almost flawless on the whole line except for the recognition of the word "This" which can still be confusing during an oral dictation!
2."I am currently in a meeting and I have no time to answer you". The application perfectly recognizes the voice transcribe word for word.
3. "I'm in the car and will call you back later." . The word "and" was not recognized. That so much, during a recovery, we managed to get it recognized. Satisfactory result.
4. “I attended the Anderlecht football match – Standard and unsurprisingly, the Lige club won the victory”. Here, we pushed the difficulty a little further by proposing to him proper names such as “Anderlecht” (which he did not recognize) and “Standard” which he wrote his way… The rest of the sentence is perfectly rdig.
5. “We still hope that Steve Jobs still impresses us with the new generation of his iPad”. Nothing to say also. The grammar was even respected regarding the “”.
6. “The antenna of the iPhone 4 arrives to reach the Moon”. Rather impressive!
To get the best results, however, you will need articulate well and talk in a quiet environment. That said, the application has been developed to give good results in noisy environments.
Once you have obtained your text, you have the additional possibility of making a correction. To do so, a keyboard is available, but you also have the possibility of selecting the desired word to obtain another choice of word. You can also delete the original word with one click.
When your text is ready to be processed, you can finally choose the desired delivery method. You can send it by SMS, by e-mail, use it to update your Facebook status, twitter and also copy / paste it to the Notes application for example.
If your text is not finished, you can add additional text to it by simply launching a new recording or typing it with your keyboard, as desired.
In conclusion, we were blown away by the precision of this application to the writing of Belgium-iPhone. We think of using it from now on often to save time during a possible note taking or the sending of an SMS. However, we noticed that when we were not connected to Wi-Fi, the processing time was relatively long depending on the reception quality of the network.
We highly appreciated the recognition of certain proper names and the correct grammar.
Dragon dictation is an application to own urgently on your iPhone especially since it is free!
Note that it is also available in a format suitable for the iPad.
Download them here, if you have a US account.
We discuss it on the forum.
