Nuance Launching Dictation, Voice Search Apps For iPhone

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on December 08, 2009

A little more than a year ago we told you about the efforts of Nuance, the company behind the Dragon Naturally Speaking line of speech recognition and dictation software, and its effort to bring voice recognition to the iPhone. Today those efforts are bearing fruit.

For the last few days I’ve been trying two Nuance iPhone apps, Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search on my iPhone. And while they’re not the first voice search or dictation apps for the iPhone, I certainly like the results I’ve been getting.

Dragon Dictation is exactly what you’d expect: Speak into the iPhone and your words are turned into text which you can then use as an email message, a text message, or in another application. In one case I dictated a few sentences into the iPhone, copied the text to the clipboard, then created a Word document in Quickoffice. What it lacks, and clearly needs, is an option to add your Facebook and/or Twiter account in order to send messages directly. In it’s current form you’d have to paste your dictated text into your favorite Twitter app, or into Facebook.

The sound of your voice is handed off to Nuance’s servers up in the cloud, and then the result is handed back to the iPhone when it’s complete. From the tests I’ve carried out, the text is ready instantly.

Like any dictation program, it struggles with unusual proper names of people and places. It understood “New York City” and Corvallis, Oregon, (the town in which I grew up), but couldn’t understand “Willamette Valley,” calling it instead “Orlando Thali.” It otherwise had few problems with my voice, even when I was speaking quickly and even when I was mumbling a bit. The more you use it, the smarter it gets at interpreting your voice.

Nuance is also releasing a voice-search app, Dragon Search. (Update: Soon. It hasn’t been approved yet. My mistake. -ed. ) Speak what you’re searching for, and your query is turned into text and which you can then submit to Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter and iTunes. I’ve seen apps like this before, but none with quite the quality of the voice recognition.

Both apps are free for a limited time — Nuance eventually expects to charge — and are coming to the iTunes app store today.

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