Here there be Dragons
Written by Alex Kidman Friday, 18 December 2009 03:03
It's no secret that Apple puts a lot of work into user interfaces, and trying very hard to get it just right. It doesn't always succeed, and there's always room for improvement— but when it gets it right, it tends to get it very right. That's the case rather solidly with the iPhone's onscreen keyboard. Despite plenty of attempts from other phone developers, I've yet to hit an onscreen smartphone keyboard that works as well as the iPhone's, despite all sorts of interesting attempts at it.
As an aside, I've long held that the results that you might get if you grabbed a Blackberry and mated it with an iPhone would be just about my perfect smartphone. Great email and keyboard from the Blackberry, everything else from the iPhone. What's not to like? Oh, yeah — the fact that it'll never happen beyond my overcooked imagination.
There are ways to implement an actual keyboard with an iPhone. You could hack one on via a serial interface if you're an incurable tinkerer — this guide covers that nicely, but it's not exactly portable. Allegedly, you can even purchase an add-on keyboard from an outfit called Mobile Mechatronics, but I've got my reservations about that one. Initial reports — and the company web site — say that it's launching in September 2009. Plenty of web sites that reported on it suggest November. Heading back to the company web site, it's stated that "Orders placed after November 1 ship Jan 10, 2010". That's not really September, now is it?
And while I'm being picky, iTwinge sounds like the kind of back ailment you'd get from staring down at an iPhone screen too long, not the name of a quality keyboard. As nobody on the planet seems to have got hold of even a pre-production sample, I'm going to put this one in the "vapourware" category, and keep hold of my "$29.99 USA Funds" for now.
Anyway, saying the iPhone's onscreen keyboard is better than its competition isn't the same thing as saying that it works exceptionally well. It's decent for short messages, and the autocorrect isn't too annoying in the majority of cases, as long as you go back and read your text prior to hitting “send”. It can also be amusing, especially when it decides to (perhaps) "accidentally" correct competitor names. A journalist colleague of mine recently found this out en route to a press event, and tweeted the following:
"The iPhone won't let me type Nikia. Nikia. Nikia. Nikia. No. Kia. FFS." (Reproduced with permission.)
Now, for short stuff, that's OK in that you can correct the iPhone's mistakes if you catch them. But what if I need a longer email entry, or want to write a short article and all that I've got that has power is my iPhone?
(Yes, I know — the odds of an iPhone battery outlasting a MacBook one are, shall we say, rather slim. But bear with me here ...)
I'd either have to type slowly and correct as I went, or record my voice and transcribe it myself. If only there were an App for that ...
Ah. Well, now. There is. Sort of.
Launched recently on the App Store (US only, curse it!) was a free version of Nuance's Dragon Dictate software. I was surprised to see an iPhone app for this task, especially for free. So, utilising a top-secret method known only to an ancient order of Tibetan meat-eating monks, I grabbed a copy and set to dictating this column — which I've done in a matter of seconds. Impressive, no?
Well, it would be if that weren’t a blatant lie. I've used an old-fashioned approach, typing it into an iMac instead. Sorry, Dragon Dictate for iPhone — you're kind of cool, but not quite that cool yet.
Dictate's normal approach — of capturing some user speech and analysing it against known databases of pronunciation, building up an increasingly accurate profile of your speech patterns and then doing almost on-the-fly transcription — is clearly beyond the iPhone's powers. Yes, even the 3GS. Perhaps in the future, when Apple crams an entire Core i7 and a couple of gigs of RAM into the iPhone 27G, it will be. Right now, there's no chance.
Instead, what Dictate for iPhone does is pretty much a brute force approach with very simple programming. You hit record in the App, and it takes in thirty-second chunks of your speech via recording, same as you might with, say, Voice Recorder. These then get uploaded to Nuance's servers, where they get transcribed and shot back down to your iPhone. The iPhone's not much more than a voice recorder with a 3G/WiFi connection in this case.
Predictably, this kind of thing has privacy advocates worried — David Pogue's got a good column on it, so I won't reinvent the wheel. I have more pertinent things to do than arguing with respected columnists for the heck of it.
Despite several journalists whose opinions I trust raving about it (including MacTheMag's editor and a bloke I used to argue with professionally in podcasts), I can't get it to work beyond about two or three words. Anything longer, and I get a "Connection Timed Out" response, which is probably due to the fact that I'm not in the US using Nuance's servers, and my connection's not up to scratch. Which is probably why it's US-only, for now. Either that, or it just doesn't like the sound of my voice.
It was suggested to me that perhaps I needed to be more American. I'm not, and I'm not likely to be, but as a test, I decided to go all Shazam/Midomi on Dictate, and see how it went with song lyrics. For reasons I won't go into right now, I spent a morning listening to Elf Radio on a DAB+ radio, full of plenty of schmaltzy singers — mostly American. For some reason, Amazing Grace came on. Yeah, wouldn't be my first choice either, but anyway. I diligently got Dictate to record just the last verse:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound/that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found./Was blind, but now I see.
Astonishingly, it didn't crash! Had I stumbled on Dictate's secret No-Non-Yankees-allowed scheme? I anxiously awaited the presumably accurate dictation result, and after some churning and grunting, Nuance's servers returned what it decided I'd recorded. For the record, I've copied and pasted it exactly as it came up on my screen after a tense wait for transcription. Here, then, is Dictate's take on the verse above:
Five.
I think some more work needs to be done there, don't you?
What do you think? Is the iPhone's onscreen keyboard enough? Would you use an accurate dictation App if one were available?
