Dragon dictation iPhone app review

One of the problems with the iPhone is that it is a pain to type out anything longer than a sentence therefore it is difficult to create a quick blog post while you are on the move.

Today I found an app that may go some way to solving this problem. Dragon dictation for the iPhone converts you speech into text which can then either be sent to an email, shared on twitter, sent via SMS or posted to Facebook. It claims to be 5X faster than typing on a keyboard and on an iPhone probably 10X that.

It is multilingual and currently supports U.S. English, U.K. English and German. French, Italian and Spanish support will be added later this year. If you are stuck not being able to understand word or phrase in one of these languages then get the person to speak into the app and paste the text into google translate for a dirty DIY babel fish.

The upside of the app is it is free, very easy to use and does work; the downside is it makes many mistakes, you need to speak slowly and clearly and there seems to be a word limit on how much speech it will convert to text.

Useful but not perfect – 6/10

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The future of travel publishing is the app

Travel guide publishing is the canary in the coal
mine for the printed book with sales down 38% in five years. If this rate of decline continues then the last LP or Rough Guide will be published in 7 years.

Spurred on by the recession and with people to choosing to use the internet to do their own research sales of printed travel guides can only continue to fall.

Let's face it lugging a travel guide book around with you is inconvenient.

The future of the travel guide is the app.

It has convenience combined with features impossible to do with the printed book:

• Point your phone at an interesting building and get its full history;
• automatically build an itinerary based on your preferences;
• get restaurant and hotel recommendations combined with discounts streamed to your phone for the area that you are standing;
• speak into your phone for automatic translation into the local language;
• and a whole host of social features that could make discovering new people as easy as finding new places.

Although the future of the printed travel guide book is bleak, the information that it contains is soon to liberated in a much more exciting way.

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Get Your Finger on the Pulse

I've been playing around with the Pulse iPhone app and I'm loving it. Very simple idea it takes 20 of your favourite rss feeds and displays them in a grid pattern with a prominent picture. It's a very similar concept to the BBC app.

It may seem gimmicky but having the pictures there makes a real difference and shows the power of imagery in grabbing attention.

If I have any criticisms they are that you can only add 20 feeds, and most annoyingly - lots of my feeds don't have pictures combined with the stories.

Get it from the app store for £1.19 for the iPhone.

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