Dragon’s Siri competitor comes to Android

Dragon Mobile Assistant is a voice assistant application for Android.

Those of you on Android with Siri envy will want to check out Dragon Mobile Assistant. It serves as a replacement for Google Now, if you wish, for quick access to voice commands. It can do everything from updating your Facebook and Twitter to scheduling events for you.

When you first start the app, you are given a list of examples of how to use Dragon Mobile Assistant. Trying something different from the preloaded lists of commands usually yielded terrible search results. The good thing is that search queries are searched in different search engines from Wolfram Alpha to Wikipedia. Unfortunately it’s up to the user to browse over to that tab. Dragon Mobile Assistant won’t give you the best answer.

Dragon Mobile Assistant is in beta so there are plenty of bugs. One of the most disconcerting things is how much battery the app consumes, especially if you’ve enabled ‘car mode,’ which reads and lets you respond to text messages. The app is constantly using the GPS to locate you and constantly listening to the command “Hi, Dragon” to wake it up.

The core speech to text functionality in Dragon Mobile Assistant is decent, though it would often confuse words, leading to hilarious mistranslations. Dragon Mobile Assistant heard “Mosconi Center” instead of the correct Moscone Center. The good thing is that Dragon Mobile Assistant will read your message back to you to confirm if you want to send or change the message before sending. Still, Nuance has some ways to go to make Dragon Mobile Assistant better at recognizing natural language.

Overall, Dragon Mobile Assistant is a good preview into what Nuance has in store for Android users looking for a good voice assistant but it is currently too buggy to recommend.