Advisor Productivity Tool: Dragon Dictate for the iPhone

I written before about how you can move toward a paperless office by dictating your client meeting notes.

Why write down some chicken scratch manual notes when you can speak for several minutes and get an email of transcribed notes?

One reason has been cost. Some dictation services cost $50 to $80 per month and limit how long you can talk.

Well for all you iPhone users out there, you now have a wonderful option. The Dragon app for your iPhone.

At least for now, you can download this app from iTunes and get it for free.

Watch this short video to see how it works.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsge4iM-FTE

Seems too good to be true, eh? Well I read about one caveat on this software.

The software has over 95% accuracy. One trick it uses to achieve high accuracy is to upload the names in your contact list. Not email addresses or phone numbers or anything else. Otherwise it would need to look up names against its entire dictionary of names.

You can read a bit more about this issue here:

http://www.tuaw.com/2009/12/08/dragon-dictation-comes-to-the-iphone-wow/

Here’s a quote from this article which speaks to the security of the transcribed messages:

Since your dictation goes out over the internet for processing, I asked Nuance about security. Their reply was as follows:

“Search queries and dictation requests are transcribed by fully automated speech recognition software, without the use of humans. Data is uploaded and collected in order to improve performance for individual users, and to improve the general performance of the system.

All speech recognition requests and associated data are processed in data centers in the U.S. that meet stringent security and privacy standards; these are the same standards that we use for processing private information in other areas of our business.”

Of course, I’d have to borrow my daughter’s iPhone to try this out myself. If you get it, leave some comments below to tell how it worked out.