Dragon Go! Shows Speech Tech is Alive and Well

One of the most interesting mini-reviews I have done was with Dragon Go! from Nuance – an iPhone app which I found to be deadly accurate in my testing. Not only did it recognize my voice with a moderately loud air conditioning unit in the background, there were occasional interruptions courtesy of gadgets and fax machines all around TMC headquarters as I tested.

Here are examples of the tests I did – you can see, I couldn’t trip it up. See for yourself how it went and how this app compares to similar ones from Bing and Google.

Since Chipotle Mexican Grill opened literally next-door to TMC’s HQ, I had to try a search for nearby Chipotle restaurants.The first three results were dead on. Moreover, the tabs at the top give the user even more options.
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A common question would likely be directions so I asked for the way to Grand Central Station and it worked flawlessly and even placed me in the Google maps app with the directions entered.

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See Google and Bing results for the same search – neither was very impressive. Google was better but neither allowed me immediate access to directions like Nuance did. It is worth noting that I have had better results with the Google app in the past where it did give me one-button access to directions via Google Maps.

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A search for local movies was perfect – no problems so far in my tests of Dragon Go!.

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Bing didn’t get this search right at all – even though it understood what I said.

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Google did a better job on the movie search but it required me to click on the first listing and when I did – it wasn’t formatted for easy reading on the iPhone.

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OK, this question was a bit unfair (or at least difficult) – but it seemed like a great test question to gauge the program’s limits.

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I tried this test again and it did give me an answer – as this time it placed me in the Google results tab.

It is worth pointing out I also tried the Google iPhone app on this one and got a response which was different from the one I got from the Nuance app.

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Another question some might place in the unfair/difficult category – “all prime numbers under 1,000” gave me a solid list of links.

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In my testing it was annoying to have to press a button on the Nuance and Bing apps when I was finished talking. At least Dragon Go! makes the button large so it is easy to click. Bing does not. Google just knows when you are finished speaking which can present problems for queries with pauses or for people who speak slowly but it can also be useful for rapid-fire searches.

In short the state-of-the-art in speech-recognition and web-search on mobile devices has increased to a new level thanks to Dragon Go! by Nuance.

See also: Nuance Dragon Dictation for iPhone Rocks!

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