Nuance Communications can once again claim a coup as its Dragon Dictation application, by our assessment, is the first voice-to-text rendering application that can support SMS texting on an iPhone.

Certainly, there are a number of speech-enabled applications on Apple’s showcase device but none, thus far, has cracked the code (so to speak) required to support spoken input of SMS texts. In our mobile speech report, we generated profiles for over 26 firms that offer speech-enabled mobile applications. Many of them have a flavor of voice dialing, dictation, voice search or other application tailored for the iPhone. Yet, until today, we believed that Promptu would be the first to have its voice-in/SMS out service up and running.

“For a limited time” the Dragon application is available for download to iPhone owners in the United States. The revenue model for such an app is subject to change, but Nuance stands to learn a lot about user expectation for this flavor of mobile speech application sans cost. As a sample of one, I’m fairly happy with the service. As with all transcription services, the recognition is not perfect, but it appears to be in the 90% level. By design the application performs transcription and then displays its results which can be tweaked or changed by the message originator before choosing to “Send to Mail”, “Send to Text Msg” or “Send to Clipboard”. These three options provide a simple way to use “copy-and-paste” functions native to the iPhone to meld voice transcription into all common message flows and use cases, including text messaging, email, memo writing and even search (although, compared Google’s integrated “Voice Search”, that use case is a bit of a stretch).

This remains early days. On the iPhone, this is by no means the “hands free” texting utility that the world has a crying need for (although it has much of the foundation for hands free use). Other voice-to-SMS application will now come fast and furiously. Promptu, for one, has told us that its speech-to-text iPhone application is in the final stages of approval with the IPhone gatekeepers. The limited time “free” offer will be subject to change as well, as speech enabled service providers experiment with various value and pricing propositions. What’s indisputable is that the power of the current technology to recognize spoken words and phrases with enough accuracy to support a commercial offering on one of the most highly-visible platforms for innovation.

For more information on the growing roster of firms offering speech-enabled mobile applications see our report, “Mobile Speech: Unlocking Personal Apps, Features and Functions,” (September, 2009).

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Tags: Apple, mobile speech, iPhone, Nuance Communications