This time, I thought I would make things a bit more interesting by dictating much of this entry. I have had to make punctuation corrections, and a few edits, but this is basically word for word what the program took down.
Recording from Nuance Dragon Dictation
This time I decided to try to do the blog in the Nuance dictation app. This review is about Nuance dictation. This app came out quite a while back, but just received an update that allows for more functionality and social networking integration. There is also a partner app called Dragon search which allows you to speak keywords and get results from all the major search engines. We will look at that app at a later time. Dictation is a revolutionary app that allows a user to talk and the application will take your voice, and convert it to text. Once you start the dictation application all you have to do is tap the big button in the middle to start recording. If it’s the first time you start using the app however, you must agree to certain terms and conditions, such as allowing contact information to be stored on the Nuance servers for quick retrieval and you must also say yes to location services once this is done you’re free to record at will anything you’d like and it will be converted to that as soon as you finish recording. So to start recording, press the big button in the middle of the screen.This will start recording speech to be sent to the Nuance servers. Once you press the stop button at the bottom of the screen A new window will appear with your converted text in it. One drawback of the application however, is you only get 20 seconds of recording time. When your 20 seconds is up you must press the record button again at the bottom of the window. This is a limitation because it has to filters through the Nuance servers and an Internet connection is required. So the reason why 20 seconds is the limit is so that the upload will not take too terribly long. once you’re done recording if you are a voiceover user, you will not be able to initially see your converted text. you have to press the keyboard button which puts you in edit mode. This mode also allows you to make any edits including punctuation and spelling that may be wrong in your converted text. Once you’re done press the keyboard button again and it will return you to the previous screen where you can enter keyboard mode, record more text, use the menu button to send our your text. from here you can use Facebook twitter or even e-mail your text to any of your accounts. you may also send this text through an SMS text message or by copying to the clipboard and sending it through another application. This will be quite useful if you use any other iPhone apps that require a lot of text especially if you do not like having to use keyboard for text entry.
Conclusion
One thing this app does not do well is punctuation. You must speak any punctuation marks such as, “period”, or “comma”. This can get quite frustrating when trying to speak a lot of text. I find it easier to sometimes add punctuation after the fact, but that also leaves you open to miss things. I am sure I have in the paragraph above. Ultimately, Dictation got almost all of my words correct with very few errors. This App is a free app in the App Store, and I urge all VoiceOver users to try it out.
