My initial tests of the release version are encouraging. Some bugs with capitalization which I identified with the beta test haven't been fixed yet, and some special characters which work fine in the iOS Notes app don't work at all, but on the whole it's a rather good start. The control commands implemented for memoQ work far better than I expected at this stage. I've got a very boring, clumsy (and unlisted) video of my initial function tests here if anyone cares to look.
Before long, I'll release a few command cheat sheets I've compiled for English (update: it's HERE), German and Portuguese, which show which iOS dictation functions are implemented so far in Hey memoQ and which don't perform as expected. There are no comprehensive lists of these commands, and even the ones that claim to cover everything have gaps and errors, which one can only sort out by trial and error. This isn't an issue with the memoQ development team for the most part, but rather of Apple's chaotic documentation.
The initial release only has a full set of commands implemented in English. Those who want to use control commands for navigating, selecting, inserting, etc. will have to enter there own localized commands for now, and this too involves some trial and error to come up with a good working set. And I hope that before long the development team will implement the language-specific command sets as a shareable light resources. That will make it much easier to get all the available languages sorted out properly for productive work.
I am very happy with what I see at the start. Here are a few highlights of the current state of Hey memoQ dictation:
- Bilingual dictation, with source language dictation active when the cursor is on the source side and target language dictation active when the cursor is on the target side. Switching languages in my usual dictation tool - Dragon NaturallySpeaking - is a total pain in the butt.
- No trainable vocabulary at present (an iOS API limitation), but this is balanced in a useful way by commands like "insert first" through "insert ninth", which enable direct insertion of the first nine items in the Translation Results pane. Thus is you maintain good termbases, the "no train" pain is minimized. And you can always work in "mixed mode" as I usually do, typing what is not convenient to speak and using keyboard shortcuts for commands not yet supported by voice control, like tag insertion.
- Microphones connected (physically or via Bluetooth) with the iPhone or iPad work well if you don't want to use the integrated microphone in the iOS device. My Apple earphones worked great in a brief test.
Some users are a bit miffed that they can't work directly with microphones connected to the computer or with Android devices, but at the present time, the iOS dictation API is the best option for the development team to explore integrated speech functions which include program control. That won't work with Chrome speech recognition, for example. As other APIs improve, we can probably expect some new options for memoQ dictation.
Moreover, with the release of iOS 12, I think many older devices (which are cheap on eBay or probably free from friends who don't use them) are now viable tools for Hey memoQ dictation. Update: I found a list of iPhone and iPad devices compatible with iOS 12 here.)
Just for fun, I tested whether Hey memoQ and Dragon NaturallySpeaking interfere with one another. They don't it seems. I switched back and forth from one to the other with no trouble. During the app's beta phase, I did not expect that I would take Hey memoQ as a serious alternative to DNS for English dictation, but with the current set of commands implemented, I can already work with greater comfort than expected, and I may in fact use this free tool quite a bit. And I think my friends working into Portuguese, Russian and other languages not supported by DNS will find Hey memoQ a better option than other dictation solutions I've seen so far.
This is just the beginning. But it's a damned good start really, and I expect very good things ahead from memoQ's development team. And I'm sure that, once again, SDL and others will follow the leader :-)
And last, but not least, here's an update to show how to connect the Hey memoQ app on your iOS device to memoQ 8.7+ on your computer to get started with dictation in translation:
And last, but not least, here's an update to show how to connect the Hey memoQ app on your iOS device to memoQ 8.7+ on your computer to get started with dictation in translation:
