Dragon voice to text software

I guess this is a perfect time to make mention of another IPhone application called Dragon Dictation. The reason it’s a good time to make note of this little application is because I’m using it right now to make this blog post. Due to some recent surgery, I’m currently left somewhat of a one-armed-man and typing is a little slow so I’ve been using this handy voice to text recognition software on my iPhone to respond to e-mail and in this case, its a great opportunity to use it to make a blog entry. If you are interested other apps see my previous post on Iphone Apps that I find useful for photography.

It’s a little odd learning to speak as one writes since the styles are considerably different but nevertheless, this works quite well. Punctuation is added by saying out the actual punctuated mark. For example when I say the word (period) . this little program adds the mark. This little free program is not perfect in its translation of voice to text, but it is amazingly accurate. And I know there are more  sophisticated versions of this available if one wants to pay. I cleaned up a few mistakes here on the keyboard, but very few.

Once you have recorded the sound you can send it as a text message, and email, or copy it to your clipboard and paste into some other application. I’m often reading things that are worthy of remembering and this app will make it handy to translate those into text and email myself.

So what does it have to do with photography? Well nothing specifically, but I can see myself making some dictation notes about a particular image or subject location and then emailing them for review later. I’ve tried the voice memo application on the Iphone, as well as the voice memo on the Canon 1D sereis cameras, but the text works a little more universally better in my current office work-flow. Below is a sample video that I found on YouTube of how this software works, and I’m not the one doing the demo.