speech-to-text

Dragon Go iPhone app expands its search options

Nuance has beefed up its Dragon Go iPhone app to let you search for information across a wider array of Web sites and services.

Available for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch since July, this free search-by-voice app is unique compared with the Google and Bing iOS apps. Dragon Go can find results and run commands across dozens of different Web sites, including Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Craiglist, Amazon, eBay, CNN, Reuters, and even CNET.

The latest update adds even more sites to the mix, notably Netflix, Spotify, Wolfram Alpha, Ask.com, and Google+. And when you tap the app's … Read more

iPhone text-to-speech, speech-to-text patents filed

A patent filing shows Apple has come up with a solution for answering the iPhone in a crowded bar or in the middle of a meeting.

Patently Apple yesterday published Apple's multipart solution, which shows the iPhone using speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies to help people who find themselves in these situations communicate more easily.

The patent calls for a microphone to monitor the ambient noise level in a room, while a noise meter would display it on the phone's screen. When the noise level hits a certain level, if the phone rings, the user can answer using several … Read more

Hands-on: IM+ for iPhone's speech-to-text feature

Typing on the iPhone/iPod Touch's keyboard can be arduous. This is never more evident than when trying to bang out messages in several instant-messaging conversations at once. Shape Services, the makers of the popular IM+ instant-messaging app ($9.99 App Store link), have realized this, and are soon rolling out a new version of the app that includes speech-to-text, albeit at a price.

Taking advantage of Apple's recently released in-app payment system, 99 cents a month gets you the feature, meaning that the annual cost of continuing to use it is about $12 a year. Not bad … Read more

TwitterFone now lets you listen, reply to friends

If you're already bored of getting English translated to Mandarin through JaJah, TwitterFone, another mobile service with voice recognition savvy, has put out a neat update that's sure to burn through your mobile phone minutes. You can now listen to the last 10 tweets from your Twitter pals and respond to any of them that you'd like using the same speech-to-text system in place for publishing tweets of your own.

It's certainly not as fast or easy to parse voice messages as the mobile version of Twitter (m.twitter.com), but if you're on an … Read more

Dixero turns your RSS feeds into podcasts

Who doesn't like listening to computer generated human voices for hours at a time? If you're a fan of Microsoft Sam, you should check out Dixero, a service that turns RSS feeds into podcasts you can subscribe to and listen to on your computer or portable devices. The company is showing of its products at this week's Web 2.0 Expo, despite the incredibly noisy show floor.

The listening quality is about the same as Odiogo, a service I looked at a few months back and have used with great success on blogs and news sites that … Read more