Nuance Dragon Dictation – Good app or contact thief?
Nuance Communications has released an app which allows you to dictate email and text messages on your iPhone, but that software (and its EULA) are not without their detractors.
The Dragon Dictation app seems to do what it says, and do it very nicely. It allows you to compose messages by speaking into your iPhone, drastically simplifying the production of long messages especially. While this is seen as a good thing indeed, there seems to be another side of the coin. The End User License Agreement (EULA) states that Nuance will not only copy some of your contact information, but that it will make use of them as Nuance sees fit, which is not a message designed to warm the cockles of a user’s heart.
The app itself looks like it does just what it is designed to do. It works well in all but the noisiest of environments. It’s easy to use; just press the record button and start talking. When you’re done, the app gives you an opportunity to edit what Nuance has transcribed, an operation that all takes place in the cloud on Nuance servers, without much of a delay. You can then take the dictated and corrected text and use it to send an email or a text message, or just send it to the clipboard so that you can paste into the app of your choice. So far so good.
On the down side, some industry wonks are saying that the EULA makes it clear that Nuance is stealing all of your contacts. They are also concerned that Nuance uploads all of your messages to the cloud for processing and thus has access to your dictated words, as well. On the former point, Nuance assures users that they just upload contact names so that they can recognize them (see this Nuance page). As far as uploading what you dictate in order to process it, Nuance says that the entire process is fully automated and performed without any intervention from humans, so your data is safe.
It seems to me that Nuance has to have the information they upload in order to do what they do to translate your spoken words into text. Especially given that only the contact names are uploaded, and that all speech-to-text happens on secure U.S.-based servers, the sky may not be falling after all. If you would like to give it a try for free, you’d better head to the App Store. It probably will not be free for long. If you’re worried about the way the program handles your contacts and speech, give it a miss. I, for one, like the app and think it will become one of my most used.
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