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LG's Optimus 7 gets previewed by Korean newspaper, has voice to text feature?
You know how we abhor machine translation, but this rumor was too juicy to pass up -- the Korea Economic Daily reportedly got hands-on with LG's Optimus 7 (aka E900) way ahead of release, and if we're reading this right, the Windows Phone 7 device will be capable of writing your text messages, emails and status updates just by hearing you speak. The publication also reports it's got a 3.8-inch, 800 x 480 screen (rather than the 3.5 or 3.7 inches we've heard before), a 1500 mAh battery, 16GB of built-in storage and a 1GHz processor. There's also apparently "automatic panorama" feature where you simply pan the camera to take stills and stitch them together, which sounds a lot like the Sweep Panorama dealie Sony recently added to its Cyber-Shot lineup. Can we expect a US version to have these features? Hard to say. Even should this preview be wholly legit, speech-to-text would probably need quite the overhaul to tell English from Korean -- and let's not even get started on Engrish.
Dragon for Email hits BlackBerry, turns your voice into a QWERTY keyboard
Okay, your voice isn't literally turning into a keyboard, but you know what we mean -- Dragon for Email is exactly what it sounds like, an app that brings Nuance's well-known speech-to-text technology to the BlackBerry platform with a special emphasis on composing emails. That's a perfect fit considering that email has remained BlackBerry's main raison d'être over the years, and it sounds delightfully unobtrusive considering that you merely need to press and hold your phone's side key while composing an email to kick off the dictation. Even better, it's free from App World for a limited time, so you might want to get in on that while the getting's good.
Encouraged by iPhone market, Nuance announces new medical apps
Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search from Nuance Communications were definite crowd-pleasers, so today the company is announcing specialized medical versions of the apps for physicians and medical professionals. The first app is Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation. It is designed to allow clinicians to dictate patient notes, emails and text messages instead of typing them on a mobile device. The idea is to let medical professionals dictate and capture information in real time with a smartphone, without having to return to a desktop or laptop computer. The product is expected to be available before the end of the year. Nuance is also announcing Dragon Medical Mobile Search, a variation of Dragon Search that will allow medical staff to search a variety of medical websites completely by voice using an iPhone. The app is expected to be released by April 30. Finally, Nuance is unveiling Dragon Medical Mobile Recorder, a voice capture app that will allow clinicians to conduct on-the-go dictation using a smartphone. Once the sound is recorded, the file is forwarded through Nuance's background speech recognition technology and into a transcription where a high quality draft is created, then returned for review and sign off. The Dragon Medical Recorder is due before the end of this year. Nuance estimates that by the end of next year, 81% of physicians will be using smartphones. More interesting is that the company research shows the iPhone breaking away from the pack of other smartphones to be the preferred device in the medical enterprise. According to the Nuance research, the Blackberry is still the leading smartphone among physicians, but the iPhone growth is explosive and almost doubled in use by physicians between 2008 and 2009. In a July survey of Medical Students it was found that 45% owned an iPhone or an iPod touch. Of those who did not own a smartphone, 60% planned to buy an iPhone or iPod touch within a year. That has to be good news for Apple, and I would expect Steve Jobs and colleagues to continue to push the iPhone into the enterprise in the coming months. For Nuance Communications, it's a further endorsement of Apple products. Earlier this month Nuance bought MacSpeech, the company that produces MacSpeech Dictate. The application uses the Dragon speech recognition engine. Nuance also provided the voice recognition that powers the popular Siri app for the iPhone, that lets users do searches with natural language queries. Peter Durlach, the Senior V.P. of marketing and Strategy for Nuance, told me the company is also taking a close look at the Apple iPad for use by medical professionals. The company will see if the form factor works for doctors and nurses, and Durlach says he expects the iPad to be an important part of future Nuance solutions.
Google Voice can now manage your cellphone's voicemail (video)
You read that headline correctly, Google Voice now works with your existing mobile phone number -- no need to choose a new Google number that must be communicated to friends, family, and co-workers. This "lighter" version of Google Voice then lets you hand-over voicemail responsibility (and your data) to Google's authority where you can listen to (or read via automatic voice to text conversion) your voicemail on a computer in any order you like, read them as text messages on your phone, and choose personalized greetings by caller. A side-by-side feature table that compares Google Voice when choosing a Google number versus your existing cellphone number can be found after the break. We've also dropped in a cutsie video overview of the change -- surely a company that produced it can't be evil, can it?
