See the product page at Nuance here.
Read one review here. If you Google or search YouTube for “Dragon Dictate iPhone” you will get more reviews and videos.
I am fascinated by this product because it moves the heavy lifting of speech recognition from a user’s local device and hardware set-up to a remote system. My iPhone is really just a wireless microphone for Nuance’s recognition supercomputer; presumably located in Burlington, Massachusetts.
This offloads the processing power requirement for speech recognition to a remote computer configured with optimal hardware, software, and voice training data… and someone else is performs all the maintenance and upgrades!
The way it is now, I have to configure each of my computers’ hardware, software, and training myself. The vocabulary and voice training I accumulate on one installation (my laptop) cannot easily be transferred to another installation (my desktop).
Is this the first step toward “cloud” speech recognition? I think so.
In the not-too-distant future, I expect I will be paying an annual fee to access Nuance’s remote recognition “supercomputer” where my latest vocabulary and recognition files reside. I will be able to use them from any smartphone, PC, or Mac with a microphone and sufficient bandwidth… from anywhere in the world.
Like all cloud based services, there will be privacy concerns. But after spending a few minutes getting instant results from my iPhone that used to take hours to achieve with a desktop setup, I’m a believer.
