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Dragon Dictation is the mobile version of Nuance Communication’s flagship Dragon Dictate voice recognition product made for Apple iOS devices. Even after a year, using the application often makes me smile and think “It’s nice to live in the future.”

The simple user interface and high quality transcription are a winning combination. To use the application, you press the record button and start speaking until you are finished and then press the done button. That is all. The recording of your voice is sent to Nuance’s servers via Wi-Fi or cellular connection, processed and the text is returned to your application.

Once Dragon Dictation has finished transcribing, the application offers choices to send the transcribed text via an SMS message, email, Facebook, Twitter, or to copy the text to the clipboard. You may also edit the text using the built in keyboard after the transcription is complete. I was able to produce the first draft of this entire article using only Dragon dictate on my iPhone. In some ways the product is similar to the Mac Speech Transcribe application that allows you to take pre-recorded text and transcribe it after-the-fact.

Overall, the quality of the transcription is quite good and I recommended highly. Unlike the desktop version of Dragon Dictate, you don’t see the transcription until it is complete. This means there is no real-time feedback mechanism or method to edit or correct in real-time. The application does not require training to transcribe, but it will adapt to your voice over time and it is possible to correct mis-recognized words to improve future accuracy. You can record up to sixty seconds at a time, although Dragon will continue to append to existing text if you press record again. The application needs low levels of ambient noise. This unfortunately meant that I had limited success with transcriptions made while speaking and walking—a situation I find particularly useful. The Dragon Dictation support documentation is brief, but provides a set of useful tips and tricks for improving accuracy and listing the spoken commands for providing punctuation and movement commands.

The Dragon Dictation mobile application is available for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Dragon Dictate for Email is available on BlackBerry App World. The product is currently free although it is ad-supported and advertisements for nuances own transcription products appear at the bottom of the screen but this has no impact on the usability in short if you are looking for an easy to use transcription pride on your mobile device DragonDictate mobile is an excellent option.