![]() There's also an option for doing a search based on snapping a photo, which I haven't yet tried. And when it misses, the resulting search term has an arrow for viewing a dropdown list of alternatives. This app does a great job in figuring out what I want to say. With the app, in addition to the traditional search bar for typing in a query, there's a microphone icon to the right where you can tap to activate speech-to-text. But there's one big advantage of the app over Safari: speech recognition. I know several power users who never bothered to download the Google app for their mobile devices after all, search is tightly integrated into the mobile Safari browser. If you'd like to check out an alternative to typing into an iPad or iPhone, this is worth a try. Still, sometimes it's nice to speak an email of a few paragraphs instead of hunting and pecking on screen. Nevertheless, having to scan multiple paragraphs and correct errors that I never would have made while typing got frustrating at times, making the idea of the wireless keyboard seem more appealing for longer text. Of course the system isn't perfect, but after a few uses I got decent results most of the time. ![]() ![]() Within the app you can tap to send your processed text to Facebook and Twitter as well as an email, and there are also easy-to-use cut and copy icons. You can speak punctuation marks as well as words, although this can get tricky, such as when the system needs to decide if "period" means the word ("a period of time") or the dot. Each word is highlighted individually for possible correction or deletion, and you can also call up the on-screen keyboard for quick changes and additions. Once you finish, you wait for Dragon to process the text and then results appear on screen. I found the manual option better, since sometimes I pause while talking and don't want recording to end. You can set the system either to recognize when you've stopped speaking or to accept a tap to indicate when you've finished. To use Dragon Dictation, you start a new note, tap the screen and begin speaking. Not surprisingly, capabilities aren't the same: Dragon Dictation for iOS works only within the app itself, so you can't use it to speak non-app-related commands to your device, such as "launch browser." Instead, this is an app for creating text notes, with in-app options to use them for social media or email. The same basic technology costing $100 or more for desktop software is available for free on iOS (and $4.99 for Android). Note: All three of these apps require an Internet connection, since the speech-to-text processing happens on remote servers, not the mobile device.
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