Dragon Naturally Speaking Arrives on the iPhone
Comments

Aha. Found the catch as to why it's free. According to reviews, starting the app presents a long EULA. Who actually reads those things...? Anyways, the EULA says the app will upload all your contacts to the company server...and apparently there's no way to stop this if you click OK to the EULA. Now WTF is up with that? Apple allows this? What do they need my contacts for? Disclosing it or not, I can't see any reason for this other than spyware type purposes.

we can use apps like IP Firewall to block that right?.. hmm

Did you read the rest of the EULA? They say they use your contacts (only names are uploaded) to improve speech recognition when you speak a contact's name. They've included the usual privacy info how they won't contact anyone on your list or share your info unless compelled by law, etc. They also collect 'speech data' from your dictations to improve their software.

Nope, you can't protect yourself that way, because if you do, the app won't work. It's only a 1mb app, because all the translation is done on the server side at Nuance's mothership. I'd assume that if you block the upload of your personal data, that you'll end up blocking uploads of your dictation to the mothership for translation to text, effectively making the app useless. If you try blocking it, post the results here for others to see...but will you ever be sure they didn't sneak it past you anyways...if it's communicating with its home, you don't know what it's sending without packet sniffing.

@wraithdu - nope, missed that part, as did most of the reviewers bringing it up. Thanks for calling me out on that and setting it straight. It bears more investigation. Still doesn't seem necessary...how does uploading names like Paul Jones from my contact list help improve speech recognition? They've never heard of Paul or Jones before? Okay, so Asdania Kooklogjian probably isn't in their data base and when I dictate it, then manually correct it, they'll learn it...? Seems reasonable. In this day and age of iPhone apps stealing your data, and Google trying to index and record everything you do, it's easy to get paranoid about your privacy. So, back to the original question...what's the catch on being free: I guess its just like Google's free 411 service...great way to gather lots of voice samples to improve overall recognition efforts.

Free...? Wow. I expected it to be very overpriced, just like their desktop apps. I wonder what the catch is.

Only available in the US store, not in Europe (as usual). That's why it's called the USWW (US wide web), not WWW.