One particular aspect of Nuance Communications Dragon Dictation for the iPhone has captured the imagination of the connected public, and not necessarily in a good way. In this blog post, Nuance’s Michael Thompson addresses the concerns of a group of people who question why, during installation, the new application copies and uploads all the names in an iPhone’s contact list. The thread of comments to the post start with concern over what Nuance intends to do with the names, but quickly branch out into a quite thorough (perhaps too thorough) critique of storage and protection of so-called “speech data.”

To be clear, Thompson assures the public that Nuance uploads the names for a single purpose: to improve the application’s ability to render the names inside a dictated message. From experience Nuance and its cohort of speech-to-text service providers are well aware of the difficulty of recognizing proper nouns. Therefore, the firm has opted to upload names only. They are not associated with other contact information or with the identity of the device and its owner.

Still, “privacy”, broadly defined remains a very sensitive matter, and a hot-button issue. Some of the specific concerns (such as the one from a “defense contractor” who needs to certify that his list of contracts is under his control or in a secure server) militate toward Nuance offering a simple “opt-out” option upon initiation of the app. We’ve learned that Nuance has already added that option for “version 1.1” which has already been proposed for expedited treatment by the AppStore gatekeepers. This “opt-out” out strategy is considered a short-term fix by Nuance. The size and scope of responses (albeit many are anonymous) is leading the company to “explore options that give users more control over what gets uploaded.” (quoting a post from Nuance Sr. Manager Nirmalya De).

I, personally, don’t believe that uploading contact names to improve recognition amounts to a “illegal disclosure”. At the same time, I applaud efforts to make mobile subscribers (and Web users in general) aware of the meta-data of their own creation that can be used to refine and improve services. Nuance has learned an important lesson: that wireless subscribers should control the information that they store on their mobile devices. But, in the mean time, the wireless public has made its general preference known: According to today’s post on the Dragon Dictate Blog, the app jetted to the upper echelons of the iTunes App Store’s list of downloads, achieving #3 among all free apps and #1 in the “business category.”

It is early days for adoption of speech enabled mobile serivces, but the public is clearly willing to test-drive (I should say “text-drive”) the latest application.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Nuance, Dragon, Mobile Speech Apps