[bsachais]

BlackBerry App World - Dragon for E-Mail

If you download this be certain to do a battery pull during the setup. If you don't the setup wizard does not go through the setup routine. I discovered this after getting hung up in the setup. After reading that others had the same problem I came across a post that mentioned the reboot. That absolutely solved the problem.

The program is quite impressive. The accuracy is excellent. It's no wonder Nuance is the leader in voice recognition software.

[pshift]

OK, thanks. That's where I am stuck at. I use their desktop program which is excellent.

[djm2]

It is curious that Sprint is not listed as one of the carriers. Anybody know if this is simply an oversight, or is it a real limitation?

[Kamau]

I've got a question.
When you use apps like this, are you speaking into the phone mic at the bottom, or the speakerphone?

[bsachais]

Speak into the phone mic.

[John U]

This is a very exciting feature. I have a technical question about how the app works. Is the processing (speech to text) done on the machine itself, or is the speech sent via phone to a server somewhere, processed, and the text returned back to your BB? The practical issue is this: do you need network access to run the app? Thanks for any information!

[daphne]

The speech is sent to Nuance's servers to be converted to text then sent back to the phone. There's a security risk there.

Their privacy policy spells it out.

PRIVACY POLICY
In order to improve recognition accuracy and to dictate names into the Address Field, Dragon for E-Mail will only upload names from your address book when permission is providedxxx8230;no emails, addresses, phone numbers, or other personal information are uploaded. This information is not used for any purpose other than improving the usability of the application. Dragon for E-Mail will also utilize the data in spoken messages to continuously improve and provide high speech recognition accuracy. All data are processed and maintained in secure data centers according to stringent privacy and security standards. For more information, please view our end user license agreement EULA - DICTATION

Yes, you need network access, i.e. a BlackBerry data plan.

[sappito]

I have been trying to download Dragon for E-Mail from BB App World, and it tells me that either my phone or carrier are not acceptable. I have a BB Storm from Verizon, operating in the U.S. Anyone else had a problem with this? Nuance says it is a problems on the App World end, no one can help me. Anyone able to help me get this app?

[monkeypaw]

I got it to load just fine. Thumbs down for the program.

On my Curve it requires assigning one of the side keys to hold while speaking. However, the phone gets confused between the use of the key while in email versus voice dialing. It keeps calling up voice dialing even though I set it to Dragon specifically to try to get it to stop bringing up what the key is assigned to. So now it'll switch between accepting voice input, flipping to the Dragon splash page, or voice dialing.

This seems to be related to the program not registering the key press. It'll work fine, then when I press the key to add the next sentence, it'll not register the press, then if I hit it again, up comes voice dialing.

Or at times, the sentence shows fine, but the "Hold side key and speak" prompt goes away. Hitting the key then brings up the voice dialing.

One unusual thing is I have also received an error, "Sorry, but we cannot reach the server. Please try again later." So I assume there is some form of communication with the server. I did not upload my address book so it must be related to the processing.

[sappito]

I gave up on trying to download it, neither RIM nor Nuance wanted to give me any assistance, so I broke down on ordered Vlingo. Love it! It works great, with very few errors, plus you can use it from within any program on the phone to insert text, search the internet, and many other options, including having it read texts and e-mails out loud while I am driving.