smartphone apps – Dispatches From The Front

Here’s a stat that’s sure to worry Google: smartphone applications now account for half the time that U.S. users spend online, up from 41 percent back in July 2014, according to a new report from comScore. And when you add tablet applications into the mix, that figure rises to nearly 60 percent.

The new milestone was achieved this July, the report says, and is a testament to our increasing reliance on native mobile applications to deliver us the information we need, as well as the entertainment and distractions we crave – things we used to turn to the web for, in previous years.

This shift towards apps is exactly why Google has been working to integrate the “web of apps” into its search engine, and to make surfacing the information hidden in apps something its Google Search app is capable of handling.

You’ve probably heard of some speech-recognition efforts, like Apple’s Siri and the dictation program Dragon NaturallySpeaking. But the world is teeming with apps that recognize other sights, sounds and stimuli. Here’s a taste.

Evernote (free; Android, iOS, Mac, Windows): Evernote is the popular notepad-of-all-trades app that keeps your notes synchronized across all of your gadgets. If you snap a photo of something that includes writing (or paste in such an image), even handwriting, its behind-the-scenes optical character-recognition algorithms decipher the writing as text. The accuracy isn’t quite good enough to convert the writing into typed text, but it’s good enough to let you perform searches on handwritten notes. That is, you can pull up the image of your scanned or photographed handwriting by typing a keyword into the search box.

Tag: smartphone apps

Smartphone apps now account for half the time Americans spend online | TechCrunch

8 Recognition Apps Work Almost Like Magic|Scientific American