Your voice into printed word

I’ve been using Dragon Naturally Speaking for ages to dictate emails and articles and have my words instantly turned into printed words. Once you have trained Dragon it works very well… but you do have to take the time to train it.

Now I’ve discovered something else that works just as efficiently and effectively but I am surprised when I mention it that so few people have heard of it and even fewer use it.

It’s called Siri and it’s available on the latest Apple digital devices… I have it on both my iphone and ipad and it makes writing “stuff” a breeze.

You can’t dictate as many words before you have to pause and let it transcribe what you’ve said as you can with Dragon, but it still does a mighty job and it’s great for messages and replies to emails.

Here’s a little bit more about it and what it can do taken from the Apple website…

Siri lets you use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls and more. Ask Siri to do things just by talking the way you talk. Siri understands what you say, knows what you mean and even talks back. Siri is so easy to use and does so much, you’ll keep finding more and more ways to use it.

Talk to Siri as you would to a person. Say something like “Tell my wife I’m running late” or “Remind me to call the vet”. Siri not only understands what you say, it’s smart enough to know what you mean. So when you ask “Any good pizza places around here?” Siri will reply “I found a number of pizza restaurants near you”. Then you can say “Hmm. How about sushi?” Siri remembers that you just asked about restaurants, so it will look for sushi restaurants in the area. And Siri is proactive, so it will question you until it finds what you’re looking for.

Siri makes everyday tasks less taxing. It figures out which apps to use for which requests, and it finds answers to queries through sources like Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. It plays the songs you want to hear, gives you directions and wakes you up. All you have to do is ask.

You can read a fuller description here.

As I said, I thought many people would know about it but on the feedback I’ve had I think its worthwhile spreading the word. By the way I don’t know whether there’s something similar on android devices.