Review: Dragon Dictation

Dragon Dictation is an iPhone and iPod Touch (2nd gen and newer) that allows you to speak in to the mic and it will transcribe your text. Once you have dictated a message you can send it as an SMS or an email.

Once I dove in to the application I was pleasantly surprised by its accuracy. It was able to transcribe a paragraph with incredible accuracy. That was in a quiet room, but is still very impressive. It’s performance isn’t as good in a room with background noise, especially if there are other people talking.

The app also features an option to import your contact names, which I found incredibly useful and a smart thing to do. If you opt to import contacts, you can dictate names of people in your contacts and Dragon will accurately pick them up and transcribe them with capitalization.

The downsides, however, are that the names of all your contacts will be uploaded to Nuances server. I don’t know about you, but I do like to have privacy. Also, all dictations are uploaded to a server, transcribed, and sent back, so if you do not have an internet connection (3G/EDGE/Wifi) the app won’t work. In my experience the app will occasionally have connection errors while the connection should be perfectly fine, and you have to repeat yourself to try again. The biggest flaw though, for me, is that you can only talk for 20 seconds.

Since it isn’t 100% accurate, Nuance has included the option to edit the text with a keyboard, and some words can be tapped for alternative options. Overall it’s a great app, and being free, you should try it out for yourself!