Dragon Dictation
Dragon DictationNuance Communications

Nuance Communications, the company behind the Dragon applications for iPhone, announced on Monday that it is launching its Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search in the Hebrew language.

The Dragon applications are available in over 41 countries and in 38 different languages. The Hebrew support means that iPhone and iPad users can now send text messages and e-mail, update their Facebook and Twitter statuses and search for Internet content without typing and simply by speaking to their machine in Hebrew.

The Dragon Dictation app allows users to dictate text with their voices and it immediately appears verbatim on the screen. The text can then be sent quickly as a text message, email, to the social networking sites or to a personal blog.

The Dragon Search app allows users to speak in Hebrew into the device and perform Internet searches quickly and easily, without typing. The application includes a toolbar called Carousel which was developed exclusively by Nuance and allows users to receive a variety of results from different sources simultaneously.

Reimund Schmald of Nuance explained in a conversation with Arutz Sheva why it took the company some time to make the applications available in Hebrew.

“We had to collect some speech data in Hebrew. We needed to learn your language and then we needed to implement it into our software,” he said. “We want you to use it so that we can improve our language models.”

Schmald noted that working in Israel “is great. We have operations here in Israel and we’re developing voice biometrics. It’s very important for us to be part of the Israeli mobile application market.”

Both apps will be available on Israel, free of charge, as of October 17. They can be found in the App Store.