Archive for December 8, 2009

Nuance launches Dragon Dictation for iPhone

{ December 8, 2009 @ 7:49 pm } · { Computer-related }
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Nuance is one of the most important companies in the mobile space, yet few cell phone owners have any idea who they are. You know that T9 feature that lets you blast out texts on your number pad? That’s theirs. If your phone does text-to-voice or voice transcription, that’s probably their technology too.

Nuance’s latest move to take over the mobile world: the iPhone. While they don’t have anything on the iPhone out-of-the-box (yet), they’ve just released an App called “Dragon Dictation”, which lets you speak your texts and emails. Drunk texting just got even easier – well, as long as you’re not slurring too bad.

Here’s how it works: Launch the app, hit the record button, and speak. Once you’re done, they pass the clip through the Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine, and return the transcribed text, which you can push into an SMS, E-mail, or to your clipboard for use with any other app.

The transcription service was more accurate than I would have expected, though not perfect. My harsh Californian (read: non-existent) accent must have been tripping it up – it would nail “Blu-ray” in one sentence, and then miss it the next time. Tapping any word it got wrong presents a list of other words it thinks you may have meant. It seems to work better when you talk at a certain pace; not too fast, and not too slow. Once you find the right cadence, accuracy is pretty solid.

Whether it’s perfect or not, it’s free – for now, at least. Nuance says that the gratis pricing is “for a limited time”, which means you better grab it while it’s hot.

YouTube for India— Feather

{ December 8, 2009 @ 7:15 pm } · { Computer-related }
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Sick of  slow youtube??

Feature, a dedicated YouTube video site from the Google itself was recently launched for those who cannot bear slow loading speed of videos. This test version of YouTube offers “ultra light watch space” which means faster buffering of video and paying less attention to other details like comments and sharing widget.

For years, YouTube had its interest in higher quality videos, HD and even 1080 pixel wide videos (that certainly require higher bandwidth). Nevertheless, YouTube realized that all countries might not have 16MBPS of internet speed and suffer sluggish videos. For us, Indians, even 1MBPS broadband is considered as God’s gift, an extravagant resource. Most of us has to settle for 256 or 512 KBPS. Consider it like watching a 5-minute video, for which you have to wait 10 minutes to load. My workaround to this problem is to open YouTube player and then pause it, as soon as it starts to load. Now come back again after few minutes to find the whole video buffered.

However, Google this time done as a favor by introducing Feather, a TestTube feature. TestTube for Youtube is what a Labs to Google i.e a experiment playground. To use this feature, you need to first join this experiment by going to http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta. Once, you are in the experiment, all the videos that you subsequently watch will feature less flashy content.