Dragon Dictation (for iPhone)

iPhone 3G, 3GS, and 4 owners coping with Siri envy can find several good apps in Apple's App Store that replicate some?but not all?of Siri's functions. Bing's iPhone app offers excellent voice-controlled Web searches, for example, while Dragon Go! listens to the commands you speak for other Web functions, like using specific online sites and services such as OpenTable, Wolfram Alpha, and Yelp. From the same maker of Dragon Go!, Nuance Communication, comes another voice-controlled app designed to increase productivity and take the stress off your typing fingers: Dragon Dictation for iPhone (free). As a simple dictation app, Dragon transcribes whatever you speak. End of story. The app does have some shortcut buttons to push the transcribed text through to Facebook, a new email message, and a few other places, but Dragon Dictate doesn't actually store any notes in the app itself.

As far as free apps go, Dragon Dictation for iPhone does a good job in its core mission: transcribing what you say aloud. But it doesn't go much beyond that.

What Dragon Dictation Can Do
Dragon Dictation is relatively accurate and fast, although users should have reasonable expectations for what that means in a lightweight app. When you press the button that tells Dragon to start listening to your speech, a "Recording" screen appears, with moving indicator bars to show that it can hear you. When you finish speaking, Dragon can (if you enable this setting) automatically detect the end of your speech, but you can press the "Done" button instead if you prefer. The app then needs a moment or two, depending on how much you just said, to process the language before spitting out typed text. When the text appears on screen, you can select any word to delete or revise. If Dragon has a second guess at what the word or words are supposed to say, it will suggest the alternate, which you can pick without having to key it in.

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At the bottom of the screen are two selections, one to pop open the keyboard and one that offers you these options: copy, email, send via SMS text message, post to Twitter, post to Facebook, and settings.

If you stop after speaking a few lines, check the transcription, and then start up again, the Dragon iPhone app will pick up where you left off, so long as you haven't moved the cursor.

In terms of accuracy, the app isn?t as clever as the full desktop dictation software, like Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 Premium for Windows ($199.99, 4.5 stars), but it's pretty good. And it works even better if you turn on a setting Recognize Names, which uses names from your Contacts list to inform Dragon on spelling.

It also handles homonyms fairly well because it looks for clues in which other words are commonly used nearby; in testing, the most common errors I saw were with similar-sounding words rather than homonyms per se. Some examples are: "we'll" and "well"; "in a" and "and a"; "endure" and "indoor."

What Dragon Dictation Cannot Do
A few of the app's limitations really bothered me. In particular I was frustrated by the inability to shake to undo, a standard feature in iOS that I use often because I am forever accidentally deleting large swathes of text. You also can't train this little app to learn special words, like proper names of places and people that might not be in your Contacts list.

Dragon Dictation is a dictation app, and not a note-taking app, so you can't save notes inside the app. I really wish the next update would add this feature, because having it would make it so much more valuable. As it is, you can copy your transcriptions and paste them into another note app, but that's clunky. I want to save the notes I make quickly and in the app where I created them. Or, better, I'd love to see a partnership with a note-taking app so that all Dragon notes I make are automatically saved to a service such as Evernote or Awesome Note (+ToDo).

Another clumsy feature in the otherwise simple and clean Dragon Dictation iPhone app rears its ugly head when you try to scroll through a long note. Six sentences into the "Gettysburg Address," it became very difficult for me to get to the bottom of the note. Every time I touched the app to scroll, words would highlight for correction. Getting the cursor where I needed it became a painstaking task.

Dragon for Dictation
In sampling speech-recognition and voice-command software, I've had overwhelmingly positive experiences with Nuance's Dragon family of products. For accuracy and speed, the Dragon Dictation iPhone app meets the standards of the brand. The usability could be improved, however, and it wouldn't take too much heavy-lifting to elevate it from being a "very good app for some" to "very good app, even if you don't think you need it." Dictation is a time-saver over typing, but Dragon Dictation needs to make it easier for users to put their words to work, adding an ability to save notes in the app or automatically save them to a third-party app, as well as cut out some of the tapping needed to send a message to email, text, Facebook, and Twitter, with a few simple voice commands.

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