Tag Archives: speech-to-text

How To Get Voice Dictation In iOS Keyboard On Older Devices

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The topic of Siri being limited to only a few iOS devices has been discussed ad nauseam. Now that it is quite clear that the older iPhone and iPod touch devices are never going to get Apple’s talking assistant, users can only concentrate on finding good apps and tweaks that replicate Siri’s functionality as accurately as possible. While there are already plenty of good Siri alternatives available for iOS, most of them focus on bringing a conversational personal assistant to your device while overlooking one important feature - the voice dictation button that is available in the keyboard of all Siri-enabled devices. Even the tweaks that port Siri to legacy phones usually leave the keyboard untouched. Having said that, voice dictation is as useful as Siri itself, and it is nice to see that a tweak has finally brought this feature to all jailbroken iDevices. Sara Dictation Keyboard adds the small microphone icon to the stock iOS keyboard, letting you dictate to your device in a number of languages. Read More

Dictate Emails To Your Windows Phone With Say Mail!

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Despite its increasing integration with many smartphones and apps, speech-to-text technology has failed to gain the trust of considerable users. A majority of people avoid relying too heavily on dictating items to their smartphones, fearing typos and low quality speech recognition. Siri or Microsoft's TellMe, while great for carrying out small system tasks, can get a bit annoying if you are trying to dictate longer passages to them (to be sent in an SMS). There are other apps that offer better solutions for dictation, but most of them are too complicated to be of much use in a hurry. Say Mail! is a Windows Phone app that focuses on letting you compose emails via dictation without much fuss. The app offers just two main features; you can speak your messages so that Say Mail! writes everything down for you, or you can request the app to read out everything you have just dictated, ensuring there is never a need to look at your phone’s screen. Another great thing about the app is its surprisingly accurate speech recognition. Say Mail! gets almost everything right in the first attempt, and even if it doesn’t, you can manually edit the text later. Read More

Dictate Facebook & Twitter Updates via iPhone Notification Center [Cydia]

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No one can doubt the fact that a lot of people bought iPhone 4S just because of Siri, but when you get down to it, Siri is pretty limited in many aspects. For example, it lets you create reminders with incredible ease, but if you want to tweet through Siri, or ask it to update your Facebook status for you, things aren’t all that easy. That’s why the new Notification Center widgets InstaFacebook and InstaTwitter can prove to be useful for both Siri-enabled and other iOS devices. You do not have to download both the tweaks for your device's Notification Center, but if you are a fan of both Twitter and Facebook, then you should probably give them a shot. The tweaks let you post Twitter and Facebook updates through the Notification Center of your iPhone, and if you don’t want to type anything, just hit the microphone icon and speak whatever you want to post to your social network! Both the widgets support 38 languages, and come with options to make changes to the dictated text manually as well. Head past the break for details. Read More

TalkTyper Lets You Talk To Your Browser For Speech-To-Text Conversion [Web]

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TalkTyper is an easy-to-use web application that allows free speech-to-text dictation right within your browser. The app provides speech recognition, making voice dictation available to you. It's doubly useful, as not only speaking faster than typing, but also because the tool serves well for accessibility scenarios, or when you lack a good keyboard (or a position to use it, anyway). All you have to do is click a button, speak, and your dictation will automatically be transcribed in a matter of seconds. TalkTyper supports a number of languages, including French, Spanish, Turkish and Arabic, making it even more useful and practical for people from various linguistic backgrounds. More details after the jump. Read More

Bing Translator Now Allows Offline Translation Via Text, Speech & Camera [WP7]

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The quality of translation apps in the Window Phone 7 Marketplace is pretty good in general. In addition to a host of third-party apps from the genre, there is one developed by Microsoft itself. We are talking about the Bing Translator app, of course. This Mango app has been around for about as long as WP7 itself, but now Translator just became a whole lot better, to compete with apps like previously reviewed Babylon. Translator now has the ability to work offline for some languages, and lets you provide input in the form of text, through speech or by scanning an image of text using the camera using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Imagine the usefulness of that feature, as now you can take your WP7 along on trips as your personal translator without having to worry about internet connectivity. After the break - an overview of the app's new and old features. Read More

Speak To Hear A Sentence’s Translation With VoiceTranslator [WP7]

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Most of us have used Google Translate at some point in time, or maybe you got the prompt pushed by the search giant automatically when you are on a webpage which is in any foreign language. Similar apps exist for Windows Phone 7 as well, like the recently covered Babylon Translator for Mango phones, but VoiceTranslator is so much more than a mere translation app. To get a word or phrase translated to any language, you just have to speak it to the app, and you will get the desired conversion. Not only that, VoiceTranslator will even speak the translated text out loud for you, so that your pronunciation of the foreign language is correct. To learn more about this awesome app, read on. Read More

SaveMeeting For Android: Record/Share Audio & Speech-To-Text Transcripts Of Meetings

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Want to share the transcripts or audio recordings of a recently concluded business meeting with your colleagues? Why not do it with SaveMeeting – a cross platform mobile app that lets you easily record and share the audio, transcriptions (speech-to-text) and other details of your meetings right from your device. All recordings are automatically uploaded to the SaveMeeting cloud, thereby helping you as well as your colleagues to instantly access shared data anytime and from anywhere. Each recording is listed under a meeting date specified on calendar that can be accessed via the company’s website. Initially released as an iOS-only app, SaveMeeting has just made its way into the Android Market. Read More