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New app makes Siri dictate for Mac

A new app called Air Dictate interacts with the iPhone 4S speech guru to dictate your spoken words on a Mac computer.

A developer is tapping Siri's brain for dictation.
Avatron

Typing with your hands is so retro.

Own an iPhone 4S and Mac computer? Check out a new hands-free typing app called Air Dictate.

There are no public APIs for using the Siri voice-activated assistant for dictation, so developer Avatron found a way to control Siri and convert speech into text. The text then transfers to the corresponding Mac (with OS X 10.6.8 or higher) running the Air Dictate Receiver app.

This means you can turn your phone into a speech recognition microphone and input text into Mail, Word, Pages, and whatever other app loves text.

While many speech-recognition programs exist for Mac computers, I suppose it is somewhat splendid to use a phone instead of a conventional microphone or headset. Would you really use your phone to type often, though?