Here's one from the “how cool is this?” files. A new app from speech technology company Nuance (News - Alert) allows you to use your iPhone (or iPad, or iPod Touch) to dictate to your computer. Dragon Remote Mic essentially turns your iPhones into a remote microphone for your PC. You can dictate to or control applications just by talking speaking into your iPhone (News - Alert).

Onlookers may think you're a little crazy, though.

The Dragon Remote Mic app is free, though use of it requires Dragon Premium, Professional, or Legal version 11.5 to be installed on the PC that it is connected to, wrote blogger Dan Seifert on Mobile Burn. Both the PC and the iPhone must be on the same Wi-Fi network for Dragon Remote Mic to work.

Mobile Burn writes that a “rumor has sprung up recently that Apple (News - Alert) has worked directly with Nuance to integrate voice recognition technology directly into future versions of iOS. The integration would allow users to dictate to and control their phones with their voices, much like Dragon Remote Mic allows control over a PC.”

Macrumors.com has reported on some of these rumors, which, if true, would lead to “deep integration” of Nuance speech technology with Apple's iOS 5. The site writes that there is “evidence that such tools are hidden but included in current developer builds...Nuance technology has also been showing up in OS X Lion in the form of new text-to-speech voices and has been rumored to be being used in Apple's new North Carolina data center.”

Whatever the origins of the app, its potential is pretty cool.