Earlier this month, Microsoft unveiled Cortana, its personal voice assistant for mobile devices that would look to take on Apple’s Siri. Voice detection has become a powerful tool for companies looking to draw in customers with futuristic technologies, but often these services are only good for a few uses, so if you are craving a specialised dictation or voice to text app – here are some of our top choices.
Dragon Dictation
Simple but effective, Dragon Dictation features a one button interface, which you tap to start dictating. Featuring a choice of 30 different languages or dialects, this free service is one of the most comprehensive apps around at the moment, learning about your speech patterns and intonation as you us the service.
Once the app has transcribed your speech, you can send it out via email or copy and paste to another application, as well as posting directly to Facebook and Twitter.
ListNote
Similar in style to Dragon, ListNote focuses on your list of previous notes to learn about your speaking habits. To create a speech note, you tap on the large Speech Recognition button at the top of the app, then speak. Translated text quickly appears in the relevant space in a new Note section on the screen.
If the text wasn’t quite what you said, tap on the arrow icon near the text and select from a short list of other guesses. Alternatively, you can edit the text manually by long-pressing on it. Conveniently, the app lets you pause in midspeech and offers a Continue Speech button.
Evernote for Android
Evernote is one of the most well-known personal assistant apps around, designed to help you keep track of ideas and thoughts. But as well as being able to record audio notes, it also allows users to turn those audiofiles into text.
Unlike many similar apps, Evernote saves both the audio and the text file together so you can use the app’s search ability to find a recorded note. The app is free, but because Evernote uses Google Android’s text transcription service, you do need to be online to use it.
Speech to Text Translator TTS
Another in-depth speech recognition and text to speech (TTS) service, this app also allows sharing notes on various instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Viber and Skype. You can also search these notes, which can be saved as .txt files, on the web.
Smart Voice Assistant
This recently redesigned app, which uses intelligent speech recognition to learn with every use, includes a fast access feature that makes it even easier to share posts on Twitter, Facebook or via email.
Notes can also be customised to a particular format without fuss, and the useful auto copy feature lets you send your transcriptions to other apps such as Google Search or Pages, or even straight to a wireless printer.
