#Dragon dictate for mac reviews full#
#Dragon dictate for mac reviews software#

I then read the same text with Dragon Dictate, using just the microphone. I tried Mountain Lion’s dictation feature twice, once with the internal microphone of my Thunderbolt display and once with a microphone that is very good for speech recognition. Wikipedia article about diabetes), to see how each of the solutions worked. I did a test, using a text that is fairly technical (the First, you “train” the program by reading about five minutes of text the first time you create a voice “profile.” This helps the program understand the way you say words. The Dragon Dictate methodĭragon Dictate has a number of advantages compared to the OS X dictation feature. The more you dictate, the more useful it is to have a good microphone. If you have a noise-canceling microphone, you can use that with the OS X dictation feature, and your results will be much better.

Finally, the OS X dictation feature doesn’t learn from your corrections: If the text it returns is incorrect, you can manually edit it, but these edits won’t help it avoid those mistakes in the future. Second, you can only speak for up to 30 seconds at a time using Mountain Lion’s dictation feature. Since speech recognition depends on picking up on some subtle vocal distinctions, you might find that your results are not ideal. First, if you use your Mac’s internal microphone, the sound quality of your voice won’t be great. There are some limitations to OS X’s dictation tool. I use iOS’s dictation often to reply to emails, and I’ve had transcription fail enough times to not count on it always being available.) (It’s important to note that you need Internet access for dictation to work, and that sometimes the servers just don’t respond. Mountain Lion then sends your speech to a remote server, which transcribes it and sends it back to your Mac to be entered as text. When you’ve finished, you either click on Done or press the Return key. OS supported: Mountain Lion (10.8.3) and Mavericks (10.To insert dictated words, you click wherever you want them to appear, then press the keyboard shortcut and start talking. Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz or faster processor - Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 recommended The automated transcribing feature needs work through. Verdictĭragon Dictate is a solid effort most useful when you dictate directly through the microphone. Voice transcription has a long way to go before it can rival the accuracy and consistency of the human brain, which can differentiate between voices, words, phrases and sentences. Having to use punctuation, as well as going back and correcting text, does stifle the ability to capture your thoughts as you freely speak.

#Dragon dictate for mac reviews full#

We still believe that voice dictation is suited to short snippets of text like short emails, rather full treatises.

While it may stumble over multiple voices in transcription, direct dictation through the mic is accurate.

#Dragon dictate for mac reviews software#

When trying it out, there will be errors creeping into the text and that's because, despite the enormous strides made by such software over the past few year, it simply cannot understand context in the way humans do.ĭragon Dictate 4 is the most advanced speech recognition application available. The application also works with Apple Pages with a number of enhancements to make dictation into that word processor easier. It can also enable you to control functions across applications like Finder, Mail, Messages, Notes and Safari.

Transcription from speech spoken through the mic provided is accurate as you can see below.

It will then carry on this training period for another 60 seconds before setting off in transcribing the whole audio file. You then have to accept text it got right (you listen to snippets of audio) or ignore it. This means the application listening to 90 seconds of recording and then outputting text. m4v.īefore processing a file for transcription, you need to set up a profile for it. Dragon can accept audio in any popular format such as. Has Nuance managed to solve the problem of having to manually transcribe recordings with the latest version of the software? In theory, this feature should make it easy to gleam notes from recordings of lectures, phone calls or meetings. If you don't, the dictation will be one huge chunk of text. Dictation technology remains unable to assess when punctuation is needed, so you still have to complete sentences by saying 'full stop' or insert pauses by saying 'comma'. While you don't have to talk like a robot, you're still required to recite punctuation out loud and this takes getting used to.