Tuesday, October 25, 2011

iPhone 4S dictation

Something I hadn't heard: on iPhone 4S, the screen keyboard has a little microphone key, which takes dictation. You tap it, talk a sentence or more, tap Stop, and it sends it to a server which sends back text.
I am still getting about two errors in every sentence, so that's crap, but it seems to work well for many, and if and when it does, it's very cool. You could dictate not only emails, but the next big vampire romance novel if you want, talked into the iPhone version of Pages.
It's irritating, normally tech works well for me, but it appears that my Danish accent is a serious barrier for dictation software. Durnit.

5 comments:

TC [Girl] said...

Eolake said...
"You could dictate not only emails, but the next big vampire romance novel if you want, talked into the iPhone version of Pages."

'xactly; while out on a walk! :-D

"It's irritating, normally tech works well for me, but it appears that my Danish accent is a serious barrier for dictation software. Durnit."

I'm still having a hard time believing that there isn't some kind of "training" of the durn thing that can be done to your voice...even though I just looked it up and it seems that they are "proud" to mention that there is no such need on this stupid phone! Well...sounds to me like they STILL DO! :-/

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I think it'd be good to have it. Although it might be harder to implement since the processing is being done in the cloud.

Also, when I've tried Dragon dictation software either for Windows or Mac, training oddly didn't seem to do a hell of a lot of good in my case.

andrea sfiligoi said...

It's the accent. Dragons understands me 99% of the time when I speak in my native Italian, and only 75-80% when I speak English.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Interesting, thanks.

Wonder how many years for Danish? Dang.

TC [Girl] said...

Was thinking EXACTLY the same thing, as soon as I read that! And...the thing that I would do, if I really wanted something badly enough, is...write and ask. :-D

Are ya gonna? Huh? :-)