
But for basic travel phrases I've been trying, the results seem dependable. Machine translations can be dicey, and the more elaborate your content the more problems you're likely to have. It didn't do as well understanding some of my test phrases in French but to be fair, there were native speakers in France who had similar problems processing my French. It even performed admirably when I was testing it in a public library and speaking softly. Like Search, Google Translate does a nice job of understanding my English speech. The app currently includes 58 languages in all. (You can also type in text to be translated.) For many but not all of the languages, you can tap to hear results spoken as well. Tap the microphone icon and speak, and Google Translate processes the text and then shows what you said and that text translated into another language of your choice. If you use Google for search on an iPad or iPhone and are at all interested in speech-to-text, I highly recommend downloading the app.Īs the name implies, this app translates from one language to another. My only UI nit is that the back button for returning to the list of Google search results after viewing one of the results links is on the bottom of the screen, not at the top, where most of us who've been using the Web for awhile would expect it.

There's also an option for doing a search based on snapping a photo, which I haven't yet tried. And when it misses, the resulting search term has an arrow for viewing a dropdown list of alternatives. This app does a great job in figuring out what I want to say. With the app, in addition to the traditional search bar for typing in a query, there's a microphone icon to the right where you can tap to activate speech-to-text. But there's one big advantage of the app over Safari: speech recognition.
#Download the best voice recognition software download#
I know several power users who never bothered to download the Google app for their mobile devices after all, search is tightly integrated into the mobile Safari browser. If you'd like to check out an alternative to typing into an iPad or iPhone, this is worth a try. Still, sometimes it's nice to speak an email of a few paragraphs instead of hunting and pecking on screen. Nevertheless, having to scan multiple paragraphs and correct errors that I never would have made while typing got frustrating at times, making the idea of the wireless keyboard seem more appealing for longer text. Of course the system isn't perfect, but after a few uses I got decent results most of the time. Within the app you can tap to send your processed text to Facebook and Twitter as well as an email, and there are also easy-to-use cut and copy icons. You can speak punctuation marks as well as words, although this can get tricky, such as when the system needs to decide if "period" means the word ("a period of time") or the dot.

Each word is highlighted individually for possible correction or deletion, and you can also call up the on-screen keyboard for quick changes and additions.

Once you finish, you wait for Dragon to process the text and then results appear on screen.
