A solution to these problems might be sitting in your briefcase, bag or pocket. Enter your smartphone or tablet and Dragon Anywhere. The latest product from the speech recognition experts at Nuance Communications is a fully-featured, business-grade speech recognition application that’s been designed from the ground up for iOS and Android devices. Like the Dragon desktop products it offers fast, highly-accurate speech recognition that continually adapts to your voice, but while the Desktop programs use your laptop or PC’s onboard power, Dragon Anywhere harnesses the power of the cloud. With Nuance’s servers handling all the hard work, the software can work hard and fast on relatively modest phones, while the software is continually improving without constant updates to the app.
How could your business use it? Well, just take a few examples.
Write emails, documents and memos, wherever you are
Dragon Anywhere makes drafting documents easy. Not only is the software accurate ‘out of the box ’, but it’s always learning about how you speak and what you want to say, tailoring itself for your own, specific voice. You can add custom words to cover industry-specific terms or acronyms and even set-up auto text – frequently used text passages like a signature, a list of bullet-points or a paragraph of legal rubric – so that you can enter these with just a quick spoken command.
Make light work of working on a phone or tablet
Tablets and smartphones are light and convenient, but they’re not always the easiest devices to work with. Virtual keyboards can be a pain to use, selecting text for formatting or editing is a headache, while intrusive auto-correct features seem to only get in the way. Dragon Anywhere makes all of these problems disappear. There’s no need to type when you can dictate at normal talking speeds, while you can select words or sentences for editing or deletion with simple voice commands. You have full control of formatting options and can easily apply underlining, italics, colours or bold text. You can work faster and leave that Bluetooth keyboard in the bag.
Use voice where you can’t really type
In many industries it’s simply not always practical to type. You could be out in the field, holding your phone or tablet, but you still need to fill in computerized-forms or make and update reports. Again, Dragon Anywhere has you covered. You can navigate through fields on a report template with intuitive ‘next input field’ and ‘previous input field’ commands. You can fill in fields and enter notes using speech alone, and even use the auto-text features to cut out unnecessary repetition. It’s a whole lot easier than jabbing the screen with a finger.
Draft now, polish later
With Dragon Anywhere you can get a basic idea or barebones draft done whenever and wherever you need to, then work on it later when you get the chance. This all comes down to the app’s cloud-based nature. It’s designed to work seamlessly with services like Dropbox or Evernote, so that you can save a file to Dropbox or export it as a note to Evernote, where it can proliferate to Evernote online or apps on your other devices.
What’s more, Dragon Anywhere is designed to work hand-in-hand with Nuance’s desktop speech recognition products, including Dragon Pro Individual and Dragon for Mac. Documents and notes you dictate in one will be instantly synchronized with the other, while key customization features like auto-texts and custom words and phrases sync automatically between the two, enabling hard-working professionals to dictate either on their mobile device or on their Mac, PC or laptop, with the same workflow and the same degrees of accuracy and personalisation. And because Dragon Anywhere is a subscription service, it can be used from several mobile devices through just the one subscription.
This level of power and functionality doesn’t come for free, but a subscription is cheaper than you might think, and there are free trials available to gauge how well Dragon Anywhere can work for you. Leave your laptop in the office and ditch the unwieldy keyboard cover. Let speech recognition do the hard work for you.
Dragon Anywhere is available from £14.99 per month. Download the free trial for Android or iOS now.
This article is brought to you in association with Nuance.
