Nuance Communications will exhibiting at Macworld | iWorld at Moscone Center in San Francisco later this week, but they’d like to give you one announcement a little early. On Wednesday, January 25th, the company will officially announce their PaperPort Notes digital note taking tool for iPad will add support for Dragon Dictation, allowing users to capture comments and ideas directly in their digital notes simply by speaking.

The biggest selling point of the iPhone 4S is, without a doubt, Siri. Sure, a faster processor is great, but talking to your phone and having it do most of the things you tell it makes this the future. What started out as an interesting application has turned into your best bet for a digital assistant. It understands you. You talk; it does. It can do all sorts of things. Let me explain.

Before I bought the iPad, I knew about the free Dragon Dictation iOS app that Nuance Communications, Inc. has up on the Apple App Store., but I had figured it would probably be more like a party trick performance-wise than a seriously useful tool. Not so! In fact, it’s so good that I’m now using it nearly as much as I do the full-featured Dragon Dictate 2.5 application on my MacBook.

It looks like rumors of Nuance-powered speech-to-text functionality in iOS 5 are actually coming true. 9to5 Mac has obtained a screenshot of how this functionality will be implemented in the upcoming iOS version: by tapping the new microphone icon and speaking into the iDevice’s microphone.

Continuous speech technology, which arrived in the late ’90s, was a massive leap forward for the technology. And today, Nuance’s Dragon Dictate speech recognition software is the state of the art both on Macs and Windows, capable of transcription of dictation at rates faster than I like to speak, and definitely faster than I can type, and with amazing accuracy.

I can vouch for Dragon Dictate 2.0 being the best Mac dictation experience I’ve yet encountered. However, there’s still room for improvement. I’m still getting a transposed letters glitch on text dictated into software other than Dictate’s own dedicated dictation Notepad, and the voice-correction feature can still stand a fair bit of user-friendliness streamlining and speed improvement. However, Dragon Dictate is an excellent tool.

This just in, Apple has acquired Siri, Inc., makers of the popular Siri personal assistant app for iPhone. The app uses Nuance voice recognition to find restaurants, movies, events, businesses and more at your request. It can even do some pretty complicated things such as convert your speech into text and then pass it along to someone in your address book. Terms of the offer from Apple haven’t been disclosed, but a managing director at Siri said, “It was a no-brainer to accept it.”

Voice technology is the wave of the future, and behind that Wave is Nuance. They are behind nearly every implementation of voice recognition of which you are aware. They’re everywhere; from the voice systems at AT&T and Vonage, to MacSpeech, GPS units, in-car units, and so much more. At CES 2010, I sat down with a few of the guys at Nuance to have a little chat.

Last week’s list was pretty awesome, but I think you’ll enjoy this week’s list, too. I have another speech driven app from Nuance, a few games, and more. Plus, this week, the App Store saw a facelift. So when you’re clicking away down below to download all these great apps, stop for a second and admire (or become irritated with) the new design.