Dragon Anywhere review: Superb iPhone dictation

At a glance

Dragon Anywhere is a powerful dictation app for iOS that can transform how you work. It’s a version of Nuance’s Dragon speech recognition software.

It needs to deliver: an annual subscription costs a NZ$240.

At that price Dragon Anywhere is not a buy, try, forget app store experiment. It’s a significant investment. It needs to earn its keep.

Worth the money?

For some people Dragon Anywhere will be worth every penny. Accurate speech to text software can unpack a new level of productivity for some people. Not everyone will see a return on the investment.

If you already use desktop dictation software, you’ll have an idea of what Dragon Anywhere can do for you.

Being able to dictate text to an iPhone is a bigger deal than it might sound at first hearing.

The designers made the iPhone for dictation. Let’s face it, writing on a tiny glass keyboard is a challenge if you want to do anything more than send a text or a tweet.

I’ve written 1000 word stories on the iPhone. It’s not fun, nor is it productive. The alternative to dictation is carrying a Bluetooth keyboard. That can be a pain in the backside.

It also means you can replace desktop dictation with your iPhone. Given that your phone goes everywhere you do, it means you can produce text almost anywhere. This explains the product name.

You could, for example, write while in the back of a car or lounging in bed. In practice I found using the iPhone for dictation is more natural than using a desktop or laptop Mac.

Anywhere

Mobility is important, because ideas do not work nine-to-five in an office. Your writing muse can turn up unannounced at any time. With Dragon Anywhere you can jot down your ideas as they appear. There’s no need to hunt around for a computer or a pen and paper.

Your phone is already your most important computer. Dragon Anywhere takes that further. Depending on how you work, you may be able to ditch the desktop altogether. Although if you don’t want to, Anywhere integrates with Nuance’s desktop dictation applications.

If Dragon Anywhere save you buying a new computer, the subscription starts to look like a bargain. Even if you don’t go that far, your typewriter keyboard may gather dust.

Dragon Anywhere works where there’s a connection

The software doesn’t quite work anywhere. You need a live internet connection. Dragon Anywhere calls on Nuance’s cloud resourced to work its magic. That means you can only use it when you have a live internet connection.

The good news is that it sips data. You might run through a megabyte or so dictating thousands of words. I found after an hour’s use, my data consumption was still measured in hundreds of kilobytes.

Another piece of good news is the cloud round trip is fast. Speak a sentence or two, pause and the text is there on screen. It takes seconds. I found I couldn’t dictate fast enough to get ahead of the cloud connection.

In other words, you can use Dragon Anywhere while you’re on the move. If you have anything but a minimal data plan you can use it without counting the bytes or hunting for Wi-Fi.

Nuance says it encryopts connections, so criminals can’t listen in on your dictations.

How well does Dragon Anywhere perform?

The performance is impressive. I used it to write a first draft of this review. From the first words I uttered it was catching almost everything without error.

The software stumbled over the word iOS in the first sentence. To be fair, it’s a specialist word. If you think of how you say the name: eye-oh-ess, not picking it up it understandable.

User error

It wasn’t the software that stumbled in the second paragraph. I can take the blame for not figuring out how to say NZ$240 in a way that made my meaning clear. Put this down to user error.

The third sentence was perfect.

Out of the first hundred words, Dragon Anywhere got everything except iOS right. That’s impressive. Remember this was my first try of the software. The software had not encountered my voice or accent before.

In practice it learns a little as it goes along. To see how this worked I read the words again and this time Dragon Anywhere scored a perfect 100 percent. It understood iOS. The software understood my speech far better than Apple’s own Siri software.

If you make an error, fixing your text is easy. The only barrier is that you have to memorise instructions. In most cases the words are obvious, you don’t need to guess them. Some take a little practice.

I ran into a problem with some New Zealand place names. That’s understandable. Dragon Anywhere allows you to add custom words to the system which gets around the problem.

The productivity question

If you notice, I hedged my words when I said the software could be worth the money. Likewise when I said it may transform how you work or make you more productive.

That’s because, good as it is, speech recognition is not for everyone. In my experience it takes longer to dictate stories than to type them. I also find I struggle to compose while speaking. This could be down to 40 years of touch typing. With practice my dictation speed might improve.

There are also times where I need to write and dictation isn’t the best tool. Writing on a train, an airplane or somewhere public would be too much for everyone else.

If you find typing is difficult or run into overuse problems, then its a godsend. If you think by speaking, you’ll love it.