Thinking about the new iPad I remembered a scene from Star Trek DS9: “The Muse”, where Jake is standing near an entrance to DS9 and watches the travelers. Being an aspiring writer, he dictates short notes to his PADD, which automatically recognizes his voice and transforms the voice into text. Wouldn’t it be nice to have such a speech recognition software on the iPad?
With this thought in mind I had a look at the website of Dragon Naturally Speaking, the pretty-much only company of speech recognition software I know of (there are probably others, it’s just that it never raised my interest). And on the home page I was greeted by the ad:
Dragon. Now on iPhone & iPod touch
Yeah, well, seems like the people at Nuance, the company that produces Dragon Naturally Speaking thought about it themselves — and more, they actually realized it (for the iPhone/iPod touch, which means it will likely also run on the iPad). If I were a serious iPhone/iPod touch developer and had already developed a voice recognition software (fat chance!) it would be a case of parallel creativity. But since I am interested in using such a software, it’s actually quite lucky that it already exists. Well, for me, kinda, while the app is free of charge, I have not looked at it yet, given that I would need an account in the U.S. iTunes store (damn!).
But it looks like at least some aspects of the amazing Star Trek technology are now (literally) at hand.
PS: I have updated the chapter on voice recorders given that Dragon Naturally Speaking can be used to automatically recognize voice recordings.
