Macworld: Dragon speaks to the iPad

Nuance Communications has announced a new version of the Dragon PaperPort Notes app for the iPad, for the first time letting people create notes simply by speaking.

PaperPort Notes’ new dictation capabilities are powered by Nuance’s proven Dragon voice recognition via the cloud-based Dragon Mobile software developers kit (SDK), which is behind a growing number of voice-enabled mobile and consumer apps.

PaperPort Notes is a complete digital note-taking app for the Apple iPad, making it easy to create handwritten, typed – and now dictated notes. The app supports accessing and saving documents from cloud services including Google Docs, Box.net, DropBox and PaperPort Anywhere. Users can also annotate and highlight documents, combine pages of documents from the cloud and the web, and capture documents using the built-in camera on the Apple iPad. PaperPort Notes saves documents as industry standard PDF, making it easy to share notes with others.

With the new release, users can easily dictate notes, create to-do lists and even create sticky notes using the new Tap-and-Speak feature. And because its powered by Dragon’s cloud-based voice recognition, people see their spoken words quickly returned as text directly within PaperPort Notes.

“Voice has become the preferred way to interact with devices and services for a simple reason — it is faster and better than any other option,”” said Robert Weideman, senior vice president and general manager of the Nuance Document Imaging Division. “”The proof is in the app — PaperPort Notes with Dragon voice input is simply a better way to create, use and share your notes.””

Key Features of PaperPort Notes

— Quickly create typed, handwritten and dictated notes:

— Annotate and highlight documents and notes, and add sticky notes:

— Add page-specific audio comments within notes:

— Combine documents or specific pages from documents stored in cloud-based document sharing services such as Google Docs, Box.net, DropBox, Evernote and PaperPort Anywhere

— Capture content from the Web and using the built-in camera on the Apple iPad 2

— Reorder, delete and copy pages, add/edit bookmarks:

— Search and navigate quickly through notes:

— Share documents and notes as industry-standard PDF using email, as well as cloud-based document sharing services

The new release of PaperPort Notes showcases how app developers can quickly add speech-to-text to their apps using the Dragon Mobile SDK — in just a matter of days. PaperPort Notes uses the same Dragon Mobile SDK used by thousands of app developers through Nuance’s NDEV Mobile developer program. To learn more, visit the NDEV Mobile developer page.

Nuance PaperPort Notes supporting English is currently available as a free download in the Apple App Store at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paperport-notes/id476134017?mt=8 .

* “