I have purchased Dragon naturally speaking in the past and spent time training the software to recognise my voice which it did a reasonable job of. When I first purchased the product it cost quite a few hundred dollars, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw it for free on the Apple app store. It is called Dragon Dictate and a company called Nuance owns it.

Naturally I downloaded it and tried it out. It did a wonderful job and if you inject words like "full stop" "new paragraph" it will carry out those formatting commands for you.

My wife who has a slight Asian accent and who did not have much luck with the older version of this product on the PC found that the ipad version worked well.

I then got Joe to give it a go with equally impressive results.

Educational use? Clear speaking yields the best results and by looking at what the software has transformed your voice into give immediate feedback to the student. This may not work in a classroom with a bunch of students talking at once, but it would work in small groups with one person presenting to others and recording their work.

The resultant words can be emailed or even posted on twitter or facebook... So a student could create a book by simply speaking into their iPad and then in Microsoft Word massage the layout and add pictures before running Aspose Words Express over the finished document to turn it into an ebook that they share using skydrive or SharePoint class sites.

As I was looking in the settings, I discovered that other languages were available. Being able to speak Chinese (Mandarin) I changed the language, read a sentence and sure enough every Chinese character was correct. It handles Japanese and Spanish - two languages we do teach in schools in the Northern Territory. So now it is also a language practise tool - or a multilingual stenographer.

 

Download it and give it a go.

 

This entry was posted on September 15, 2011 at 6:34 AM and has received 407 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.