The iPhone app that takes the strain out of texting by turning speech into type

By Andrew Levy

Dragon Dictation, due to be released in the UK this week, is free to download onto iPhones and has become one of the most popular applications in the U.S


Can't get the hang of two-thumbed typing? Perplexed by predictive text? Cursed with sausage fingers? Or just plain lazy?

Never fear. Your days of tapping messages into your mobile using tiny keys could be over after a new phone 'app' was released that turns speech into text.

Users can dictate messages into the phone which displays what they have said on the screen at the tap of a button. It can then be sent as a text or email.

The phone will also respond to demands for punctuation with commands such as ‘exclamation mark’ or ‘new paragraph’

Dragon Dictation is free to download onto iPhones and has become one of the most popular applications in the U.S.. It is due to be released in the UK this week.

If it is as unreliable as the voice-recognition software that banks, cinema chains and other companies are already fond of, there could be some hilarious - or unfortunate consequences.


Users can dictate messages into the phone which displays what they have said on the screen at the tap of a button


But Nuance, the American firm behind it which pioneered predictive text and provides the in-car voice-activated controls in top-of-the-range BMWs, is confident it works.

This is because it doesn't rely on the phone's relatively small processing power but instead sends the recording to powerful remote servers which check the accuracy and generate the message.

Any mistakes can be corrected by tapping the screen to register an error and choosing from a drop-down list of replacements. And if the worst comes to the worst, you can always delete the word and type in the right one.

Another benefit could be the end of abbreviations such as L8R (later) or LOL (laugh out loud) which became popular ways to save time while texting.

Drawbacks include needing a good 3G connection, having to manually call up recipients' details to send the message, and problems with place names, proper nouns and regional accents.

Similar apps are available for other handsets such as Android and Blackberry, although these are considered less reliable at present.

Nuance are also planning to launch an app that uses voice-recognition technology to carry out web searches, although Google's Android phones already have this feature.

Professor Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Lancaster University, said: 'Boy, are we getting lazy. You can't even text any more - you just talk into the phone.

'We are trying to do less and less and get technology to do more and more. My worry in this case is how accurate it is and whether people check the message before they send it. Can you imagine what could happen?

'It'll obviously get better and more sophisticated but the question is "Will it save time?" I bet it won't be completely accurate and you will have to go in and erase words or full sentences.'


source: dailymail