Okay! I don’t have an iPhone 4S. In other words, I don’t have a personal assistant named Siri. I can’t speak to my phone and receive cheeky answers. If I want to find a place to hide a body I have to do the research myself. But those of us who are “sans Siri” sometimes just want to speak into our phone and make things happen! Is there a voice recognition app for the rest of us?
Voice recognition software is certainly nothing new. It has, however, been vastly improved over the years. One of the biggest names in voice recognition is Dragon Dictation by Nuance. Now that our iPhones will do so much, it was only a matter of time before Nuance came out with a voice recognition app. This free application does a nice job. It’s simple and effective. And it works!
You know that I personally test and use all the apps that I review, and this one is no different. However, since I couldn’t think of anything important to say with which to test the app, I had to come up with something with which to test it. So I tested the app using an episode of the Digital Photography Cafe, with hosts Trevor Current and Joseph Cristina. I basically started an episode at random and hit the “Tap and dictate” button on the app. You can see the results in the photo to the right.
Perfect? No. But certainly pretty close. If you see a mistake you can click on the keyboard app and make corrections. Once you have it right you may send it via text or email, copy it to another application, or post to Facebook or Twitter.
So it’s not Siri, but what can you do with Dragon Naturally Speaking? In my opinion, it is helpful for just what it says it does: dictation. It can’t tell you where to hide a body and it can’t even play an Arctic Monkeys song. But it can do one thing and do it well: dictation.
So check it out. All the best…Mike
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A college administrator by profession, Mike Kennamer enjoys the opportunity to take photos and improve his skills by shooting events at work, church, and for friends. He enjoys landscape photography, portraiture and is starting to dabble in HDR. His current photography project involves learning to control flash manually. “My goal”, according to Kennamer, “is to be the best photographer I can be.”
Kennamer is also the President of Kennamer Media Group, Inc., a provider of traditional and online media, specializing in the healthcare industry. On CurrentPhotographer.com he writes about iPhone and iPad applications for photographers.