Does anybody have any recommendations for a more accurate but still-easy-to-use dictation software for the iPhone other than the one the phone comes with? I have 6s.
I use the Iphone more than anything else in my writing and I would like to use it during my walks. Also, for when my hands get tired.
Thanks.
Summerfield
Nobody has replied to this, so I’ll have a go.
Other than Apple’s own dictation tools, the only one that I’ve used for iOS is Dragon Anywhere. It has the resources of the developer Nuance behind it, including work on Dragon for Mac and Dragon for Windows (or whatever it’s now called), which I guess can be regarded as the market leaders on the desktop.
But voice-to-text remains a not-yet-perfected technology, and the quality of the results you get with Dragon Anywhere (accuracy, speed) is likely to reflect this. The quality of the outcomes will also be affected by the "suitability"of your dictation style; it will almost certainly require practice. I’ve seen too many users fail to achieve what they want with Nuance’s dictation apps because of probaby unsuitable dictating styles, and then seen them blame the software. (However, I haven’t tested Dragon Anywhere for direct dictation into Scrivener for iOS. I don’t know how well that would work.)
Hi Summerfield,
While I haven’t used dictation extensively, I have played around with it a fair bit, and had reasonably good results with Apple’s. But that was in a controlled environment: at home, no one else around, speaking very carefully, and being very aware that I needed to mitigate my relatively mild NYC accent.
On walks, ambient noise made dictation unusable.
Ultimately, when I wanted to go hands free, I found that using Apple’s voice recorder to capture my thoughts was a far less distracting experience than dictation. Obviously having to manually transcribe after the fact is a pain, but it is preferable to speaking for 5 minutes and then realizing the stupid dictation software thought I was finished 4 minutes ago and missed most of it.
But I wonder if there’s an app out there that could take the audio files from the recording and transcribe them. It would be a two or three step process, but less distracting on the dictation side and less chance of error on the transcription side.
Jim
Dear Jim and Hugh,
Thank you for your replies. I just found a tutorial video about dragging a dictation file into one section of a split screen. It looked great. I don’t know what dictation software they were using and I want to look at it more carefully to see how the syncing actually works. Right now I just use the IOS microphone and while it transcribes with a high percentage of errors it does let me record without typing.
Hello Summerfield. Can you describe the steps you took to do this? I am looking to do something similar myself as it would be very helpful for my writing, but I confess to not understanding your reference above about ‘dragging a dictation file into one section of a split screen.’ Can you list what programs, other than scrivener and iOS microphone, that you are using and the steps you took? Thank you.
I’d also love to know ways to dictate into my iPhone on walks, have it transcribed immediately, and be able to copy the transcription into Scrivener.
Would the Bear notes app facilitate this?