#Dragon dictate mic for mac
#Dragon dictate mic pdf
#Dragon dictate mic mac

He also previously highlighted the iOS version which is only voice recognition and offers no device control. Our own Xavier Lanier gave the old version a whirl a year and half ago.

#Dragon dictate mic mac

The Mac version of Nuance’s speech recognition program was formerly called MacSpeech. While the program is much better than it was ten years ago, it still has a steep learning curve for the user who plans to not only talk to type but also control the computer 100% with the application. When I recently had a thumb injury that made typing painful, I took the opportunity to give the $179.99 Mac version of this program a try. At that time the speech recognition engine was about 85-90% accurate to my best recollection. I first attempted to use Dragon Naturally Speaking for Windows more than a decade ago.

#Dragon dictate mic for mac

Dragon Dictate is not as easy to get working in any context, but when you need to dictate long passages of text, its increased accuracy makes it the clear choice.Dragon Dictate 2.0 for Mac from Nuance is a speech recognition program that allows the user to enter text using a microphone instead of a keyboard. The Mavericks tool’s best feature is the ability to activate it anywhere on my Mac and immediately start dictating I’m using it in all sorts of unexpected places on my Mac. Nevertheless, I’m finding use for both of them. The way I see it, Mavericks’s Dictation tool is like Dragon Dictate Lite. Then again, Dragon Dictate costs $200, while the Mavericks tool is free. In other words, Dragon Dictate is a fully developed, feature-rich product Mavericks’s Dictation, not so much. Dragon Dictate also has several additional features for controlling the user interface that are simply not available with the Dictation module in Mavericks.

In addition to increased accuracy, Dragon Dictate has the ability to learn words you use often, and nearly always handles proper names better than the Mavericks Dictation tool. Also, Dragon Dictate requires you to spend time training it before it will even work, so it has a much better idea of your voice and the way in which you speak. Dragon Dictate is a paid application with several years’ worth of development effort behind it. Although that difference might seem insubstantial, and although Mavericks still got a very high B, if you were to dictate a passage of 10,000 words, the text would have more than 1000 errors if you used Mavericks’s Dictation tool, versus about a third of that in Dragon Dictate. So the final accuracy scores were 96.6 percent for Dragon Dictate and 89.6 percent for Mavericks’s Dictation. It insisted on transcribing “class scored” as “classic lord.” Overall, it made nine mistakes. It too tripped on “expository,” but less hilariously than Dictation, writing “expositors” instead. In the end, Mavericks’s built-in Dictation tool made 28 mistakes.ĭragon Dictate had fewer problems but still made some mistakes of its own. For instance, when I said “detail,” it transcribed “D tell.” When I said “expository,” it heard “Expo is a Tory.” The program had particular problems with the sentence “Students must be jarred out of this approach.” I spent several minutes trying to get Dictation to transcribe “jarred” and “jar” correctly each time it transcribed them both as “John.” I also found it odd that Dictation refused to insert a space before opening quotation marks it failed to do so in every instance of my test. Mavericks Dictation’s errors were more frequent and more ridiculous, however. The results? Both programs made mistakes.

The results from Mavericks’s built-in Dictation tool. (Note that, while Apple has never stated publicly where it got the technology behind Siri dictation, I strongly suspect it is Nuance, the same company that publishes Dragon Dictate.) So when I heard that Apple was improving the Dictation tool in OS X, my first question was: How will it compare to Dragon? When I heard that Apple was improving the Dictation tool in OS X, my first question was: How will it compare to Dragon? (When I first started dictating, you … had … to … talk … like … this … leaving … a … space … between … each … word.) My usual tool is Dragon Dictate for Mac. I’ve been dictating to computers for a long time. It’s great.īut Mac dictation isn’t new to Mavericks.

#Dragon dictate mic pdf

I find myself using it throughout the operating system and in places that I’d never thought of using dictation before, including online forms and annotations to PDF files.

With my Retina MacBook Pro, the two microphones are so good that I can even dictate without first donning a headset microphone (a traditional requirement for dictation). In fact, it’s how I’m adding this very text. The feature works anywhere on the Mac that you can enter text, no training or customization necessary. Now, when you press the Fn key twice and start speaking, the words appear on screen as you speak. Having this transcription-support file on your Mac dramatically improves the functionality of OS X’s built-in Dictation feature.