Apple is apparently adding support for speech-to-text input to iOS 5. While speech recognition wasn’t one of the features Apple mentioned when introducing the next-generation mobile operating system, the folks at 9 to 5 Mac found a special keyboard hidden away in the latest iOS 5 beta with a microphone next to the space bar.

When you tap the microphone icon, a new screen opens showing a larger microphone. The feature isn’t fully functional yet, but it looks like you’ll be able to talk to your device for a period of time and then iOS will attempt to convert your words into speech, allowing you to enter text much more quickly — or in situations where tapping on the keyboard might not be an option.

Apple didn’t make the new feature easy to hide. The special keyboard and the microphone button are both labeled with misleading names in the latest beta. But it certainly eems like Apple is hoping to have the system in place by the time iOS 5 is released to the public.

Google Android already has speech recognition built into the operating system.

Google has added a new “Personalized recognition” option to its Voice Search app for Android. in a nutshell, that means that the more often you talk to your phone, the better it will get at recognizing your voice requests.

While Voice Search and speech recognition have been available for Android for a while, so far Google has taken a rather broad approach, designing the service to recognize a range of voices with different ages, accents, pitches, and other features. But in a blog post, Google says the company knew all along that offering personalized recognition features tailored to your voice would lead to more accurate speech recognition — so today the company rolled out a new version of Voice Search which lets you opt in to personalized recognition.

Your custom settings are saved to your Google account, which means if you switch phones, all the time you spent training your last phone shouldn’t be in vain. But if you’d rather not have your phone’s notes on your voice sitting on a Google server somewhere, you can disable Personalized recognition, or just decline to enable it the first time you run the Voice Search app after installing the update.

You can check out a few more screenshots after the break.

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There are boatloads of twitter apps for Android which let you see updates from your contacts and tap out updates using your phone’s keyboard. Twitoc isn’t one of them. Instead it’s a simple widget-based app that you can place on your home screen. Tap it once and Twitoc will use Google voice recognition to let you update your Twitter status using your voice.

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Just pick the large or small widget and slap it on your home screen, and enter you Twitter credentials in the settings and you’re good go to. If you’ve ever used Google’s voice recognition you know that it’s pretty good, but not perfect. Fortunately, Twitoc shows you the transcript of your dialog before sending it off for all your Twitter followers to see, so you can make corrections if necessary.

Twitoc also recently launched support for plugins. The first is a Camera plugin that lets you snap a photo and then speak your status update. The image will be uploaded to Plixi.com and shared with your status update.

While Twitoc is available as a free download for Android 2.1 and up, the camera plugin costs $0.96. I guess that’s how the company plans to make money off its apps. Twitoc promises to release additional plugins over the next few weeks.

If you want to read Twitter updates from your contacts or the public timeline, you’ll need a different Twitter app because Twitoc isn’t a full service Twitter app, but rather a status update tool.

via AndroidGuys

Google Android has built-in speech recognition, which means you can translate speech to text in many apps. But Edwin is one of the few that will talk back. For instance, you can ask Edwin the time, and it will tell you. Ask it for tomorrow’s forecast and a computerized voice will read it to you. You can even ask it to translate words or sentences from one language to another or to define or spell words for you.

Edwin also works as an app launcher and controller for your phone’s hardware. For instance, you can tell it to put your phone in airplane mode or turn the Bluetooth on or off. Or you can tell it to open the camera application.

Like most speech recognition apps, Edwin isn’t perfect. Or maybe it’s just my voice that isn’t perfect. Sometimes it misunderstands commands, and while you’re supposed to be able to open applications by saying “launch X” or “open X,” I’ve found that it works a lot better with “open.” But overall, it’s a pretty nifty little application, and best of all it’s available as a free download.

After the break is a video showing how Edwin responds when I ask it for the time, temperature, nearest movie theater, and other information.

via Gizmodo

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Dragon Dictation is a free speech recognition app for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. All you have to do is tap the screen to start a recording and when you’re done talking Dragon will automatically convert your words to text. I found the app was pretty accurate when I tested it with an iPod touch and a headset, but it did make a few errors. Fortunately, Dragon Dictation has some excellent tools that let you make corrections by tapping a word to see a list of similar words or by pulling up an on-screen keyboard.

You can also copy the entire chunk of text to paste it into another app. And Dragon recently launched an updated version of the app which adds support for sharing your text on Twitter or Facebook, making it as easy to post status updates on those networks as it is to talk into your phone’s mic.

Version 2.0 also adds multilingual support, and the ability tp paste text into the iPhone SMS client.

Dragon Dictation 2.0 is available as a free download from the App Store.

via Gizmodo