iPad Speech Recognition App

[gavins38]

I've been asked to find out if there are any diction apps available on iPad other than Dragon Dictate? We've already tried Dragon in the school but have had problems getting it to worth through the proxy. I've opened dozens of ports based on the advice on various other threads here but nothing has worked and I've had to call it a day on that app. Unfortunately I don't know of any others and everybody we've asked has always pointed us back to Dragon again. I think this might be a lost cause but I might as well ask.

[FN-GM]

Have you considered Siri?

[gavins38]

Can Siri be used to dictate to a notepad app of some sort? Does it need internet access, am I going to face the same proxy problems as Dragon Dictate?

[FN-GM]

It does need internet you might face proxy issues. You can use it in the built in note app.

[gavins38]

It's worth a shot I suppose. Anyone had any luck in getting this working through a proxy?

[jlucas]

We've has problems with proxies and the dictation software on iPads

 

It doesn't seem to take any notice of the system proxies.

[gavins38]

That's the general consensus that I've encountered so far. Most of the big players don't appear to be interested in incorporating proxy access into their apps and Apple obviously haven't made it easy for app developers to use the system proxy. I wondered if there were any dication apps that didn't require interenet access, but maybe that would make the app too large to work as an iPad app.

[FN-GM]

That's the general consensus that I've encountered so far. Most of the big players don't appear to be interested in incorporating proxy access into their apps and Apple obviously haven't made it easy for app developers to use the system proxy. I wondered if there were any dication apps that didn't require interenet access, but maybe that would make the app too large to work as an iPad app.

 

Not much of a shock really. The iPad is design as a consumer device, not many of those have proxies!

[gavins38]

Unfortunately that is a problem of all Apple technology, but I have to try and accommodate what the school wants to do.

[dhicks]

We've already tried Dragon in the school but have had problems getting it to worth through the proxy.

 

Just to update this thread (found it when I was searching for something else) - you don't need to unblock specific ports so much as IP addresses:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/educational-software/84289-dragon-dictation-ipad.html#post978537

 

Both the Dragon Dictation iOS app and Apple's Siri use Nuance's server-side audio processing technology for speech recognition, and might well even use the exact same server farm - we've tried both Dragon and Siri on our network and both now seem to work fine.

 

Just to add that the speech recognition provided (for free!) by this app seems to be very good - no voice training needed, you can just speak into the device and get accurate speech-to-text. We might give this a try on the iPod Touch with some of the smaller children, see if it works with their voices. The approach of doing all the procesing off on a server farm seems to work well - the app seems to just record the sound, then send it away for processing.

[Chriss31]

Just to update this thread (found it when I was searching for something else) - you don't need to unblock specific ports so much as IP addresses:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/educational-software/84289-dragon-dictation-ipad.html#post978537

 

Both the Dragon Dictation iOS app and Apple's Siri use Nuance's server-side audio processing technology for speech recognition, and might well even use the exact same server farm - we've tried both Dragon and Siri on our network and both now seem to work fine.

 

Just to add that the speech recognition provided (for free!) by this app seems to be very good - no voice training needed, you can just speak into the device and get accurate speech-to-text. We might give this a try on the iPod Touch with some of the smaller children, see if it works with their voices. The approach of doing all the procesing off on a server farm seems to work well - the app seems to just record the sound, then send it away for processing.

 

Hi David

 

Did you end up using Dragon Dictation on the iPod Touch? If so, how did you find it?

 

Thanks

[dhicks]

Did you end up using Dragon Dictation on the iPod Touch?

 

The whole use-of-tablets-in-classrooms project has gotten rather buried under general run-around-fixing-PCs work at the moment, we'll get back to it at some point. I didn't have a chance yet to try voice recognition with smaller children, I'm not sure if it picks up their voices properly or not.