Turn speech into text

    Can ”t get the hang of two-thumbed typing? Perplexed by predictive text? Cursed with sausage fingers? Or just plain lazy? Never fear. Your days of tapping messages into your mobile using tiny keys could be over after a new phone “app” Was released that turns speech into text. Users can dictate messages into the phone which displays what they have said on the screen at the tap of a button. It can then be sent as a text or email. The phone will also respond to demands for punctuation with commands such as “exclamation mark” or “mew paragraph”. Any mistakes can be tapping the screen to register an error and choosing from a drop-down list of replacements. And if the worst comes to the worst, you can always delete the words and type in the right one. Another benefit could be the end of abbreviations such as L8R {later} or LOL {laugh out loud} which became popular ways to save time while texting.

 Drawbacks include needing a good 3G connection, having to manually call up receipients details to  send the message, and problems with place names, proper nouns and regional accents. Nuance, the   American firm behind it which pioneered predictive text and provideos the in-car vioceactivated controls in top-of-the-range BMWs, is confident it works. Nuance are also planning to launch an “app” that uses voice-recognition technology to carry out web searches, although Google”s Android phones already 

have this feature.