Tired of your phone’s tiny keypad and annoying – though sometimes hysterical – autocorrect?
I’m composing this blog post by speaking into my iPod using the Dragon Dictation app. Dragon Dictation is a free speech-to-text app that transcribes quickly and accurately, and it takes less than a minute to learn how to use.
The tool is useful for writing notes, sending quick emails, and directly posting updates to Facebook and Twitter. And with two finger taps, I can copy and paste my transcript into any text editor.
The accuracy is more than decent but far from perfect, so to edit the text, the app includes suggested words for misspellings and a keypad for making corrections. If you have an aversion to the keypad, there are voice commands for editing.
No application is perfect, so here are the downsides:
- Requires network connectivity – the transcribing is happening on a server and not your device, which brings up another downside: privacy concerns.
- Lacks a rich text editor – text formatting is limited. To add the hyperlinks and bullets to my post, I had to copy and paste the text into WordPress and make my changes there.
- No Autosave – if you accidentally exit the app, your text is gone.
- Short recording time – 30 seconds max. But this isn’t a major issue, since you can simply tap the record button to continue where you left off.
- Sensitive to background sounds – in a noisy place? It won’t work. I was sitting close to an open window, and the app suggested I find a quieter spot.
Dragon Dictation is listed on the library’s suggested mobile apps page and is available on our iPad2s. To see a complete list of our installed apps, visit our iPad Pilot LibGuide.
If you decide to become a regular user of Dragon Dictation, check out Nuance’s Voice Commands Cheat Sheet for more advanced tips.
