Even with that extra step, though, I'm finding Dragon to be a much faster, more efficient way to spit out e-mail messages, notes, text messages and Twitter updates. It's really, really cool.

If you look at the reviews for this app on the iTunes store, though, you'll be astonished--there are over 1,000 one-star reviews! What's going on? They're not judging the app on its design or effectiveness, that's for sure.

Instead, people are freaked out by that "your audio is converted by Nuance's servers" part. They think this is a privacy violation. They fear that someone at Nuance might listen in to the audio. (Nuance says nope, it's just a bunch of computers, maintained in a secure facility, and the audio and transcriptions are not saved.)

They're also alarmed by the welcome screen's note that the names in your address book are uploaded to Nuance, too. Eeks! Nuance will know the names of the people we know!

OK, first of all, this business of your audio being sent to Nuance for transcription rings a very familiar bell. Remember the Gmail brouhaha? When Gmail debuted, it offered a fantastic e-mail account, paid for by small text ads on the side whose subjects are matched to the e-mail contents.

At the time, everyone was hysterical about the supposed privacy violation: Google will be reading my e-mail! Of course, no humans were looking at your e-mail. It was just a bunch of servers analyzing keywords. Today, everybody's forgotten all about it. But now the issue rises again with Dragon Dictation.

As for the names in your Contacts: they're sent to Nuance so that the app will recognize the names when you dictate them. No other information (phone numbers, e-mail, addresses, etc.) is transmitted.