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Winscribe Dictation; Dragon Anywhere Group; Dragon Anywhere; Dragon Professional Individual (PC). Dragon Individual for Mac, v6 Install Guide (PDF) Dragon Individual for Mac, v6 User Guide (PDF). Reach out to the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Value-Added Reseller community. A local Dragon partner can provide in-person product training. The initial versions of Macspeech Dictate were so badly we were almost forced to upgrade to the new versions. I think Dragon dictate version 3 was pretty good. Dragon dictate version for to me doesn’t seem to be a new product, it seems to be a minor upgrade. Maybe if the upgrade was $20 or $30 it might be reasonable.
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Dragon Professional Individual for Mac 6.0, English
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Another year, another upgrade to Nuance’s Dragon ($300; $150 upgrade), their speech recognition solution. I reviewed version 5 last year, pointing out that “Dragon offers some of the biggest changes since this software was first introduced, both under the hood and on the screen.”
Building on the changes made to the speech recognition engine in Dragon 5, Nuance has improved Dragon’s performance across the board. Boasting improvements in accuracy of either 15 or 24 percent (the company has cited both of these numbers), Nuance claims that Dragon offers “up to 99% recognition accuracy.” Naturally, “up to” covers a wide range of results, but this version of Dragon does seem more accurate than version 5.
Nuance claims that this version of Dragon leverages “deep learning” to improve accuracy. Reading about this technology, it seems like a more powerful extension of the way Dragon already created speech models for each user. In my testing, I created a new profile and it did seem that Dragon was more efficient out-of-the-box, with the briefest voice training, than with previous versions. It’s not perfect and probably never will be, but it seems to get better every year.
I’ve been using Dragon 6 for several weeks, and I’ve been impressed by this accuracy. I would be hard pressed to find an improvement of a double-digit percentage, but I find that I’m correcting fewer small words: prepositions, adverbs, or articles. That may not sound like much, but if you dictate often, you understand that correcting those little words takes as much time as any other correction.
Visually, Nuance has simplified the Dragon interface. The status bar is smaller, and the correction window is separate, making these two items easy to position on your screen.
The company has improved formatting for numbers, times, and amounts, which can save time. And the transcription process—when you use Dragon to create text from a recording—is simpler.
Mixing typing and dictating
The biggest change in Dragon 6 is the ability to mix dictating and typing in certain applications. Dragon for Mac was never very happy when you combined dictating in the same document, except with just a couple of apps. In the past, if you dictated a couple of sentences, then typed or pasted something, Dragon lost track of the text and the position of the cursor in the document, making it harder to edit text. You can get over this by saying “cache document” every time you made a change; Dragon quickly reads through the entire document to know where all the words are.
In the new version, Dragon takes advantage of Apple’s accessibility framework to insert text into documents more quickly, and to keep track of what words are in a document, and where. With version 5, every time you paused after saying something, you would see the text appear on the screen one letter, one word at a time, very quickly. But now, with apps that correctly use the accessibility framework, Dragon actually pastes the text, the entire utterance in one go. This makes dictation much faster, as long as you’re using an application that supports this, such as TextEdit, the most recent versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, Scrivener, Messages, Microsoft Word, Outlook, and others. You can see a list of these applications here.
Dragon 6 was designed in such a way that if a new application supports the accessibility framework it can automatically allow you to dictate and type, and insert text quickly. You won’t need to update Dragon in order to benefit from this.
Nuance has long recommended that one use a microphone designed for speech recognition, and, in the past, I did so. But for my tests with Dragon 6, I used a microphone that I bought for podcasting, the Rode NT–USB. The results with this microphone are nearly as good as what I have seen in the past with microphones specifically designed for speech recognition. You can even use your Mac’s internal microphone; the results aren’t quite as good, but they are much better than you might expect.
My only criticism of this version of Dragon is the price. While $300 is a fair price for an app that does what Dragon does, I feel that $150 is pretty steep for an upgrade, especially if you just bought version 5 last year, or even a few months ago; at the time, the app cost just $200. For non-professional users, this is a pretty steep price, and is likely the most expensive app on their Macs.
Bottom line
Despite the price, I wouldn’t want to be without Dragon. I don’t dictate all of my work, far from it, but I take advantage of Dragon’s powers to change the way I work several times a week. Instead of leaning over my keyboard, I sit back, relax, and talk to my Mac. And my words appear on screen. That’s pretty magical.
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Dragon Professional Individual for Mac 6.0, English
Learn moreDragon's speech recognition is so powerful and accurate that it will change the way you use your Mac.Pros
- Can mix dictating and typing in certain applications
- Better overall performance
- Increased accuracy
DragonDictate, Dragon Dictate, or Dragon for Mac is proprietary speech recognition software. The older program, DragonDictate, was originally developed by Dragon Systems for Microsoft Windows. It has now been replaced by Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows, and has since been acquired by Nuance Communications. Dragon Dictate for Mac 2.0 (originally named MacSpeech Dictate[1]) is supported only on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Nuance's other products for Mac include MacSpeech Scribe.
Original DragonDictate[edit]
DragonDictate for Windows was the original speech recognition application from Dragon Systems and used discrete speech where the user must pause between speaking each word. The first version, 1.0 was available only through a few distribution and support partners. It included a Shurecardioid microphone headset. Later it was replaced by Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which allows continuous speech recognition and correction and training of words via the keyboard. NaturallySpeaking remains a Windows-only program, and since 2016 distributes in Version 15. DragonDictate for Windows is still available but has not been updated since Windows 98 was the current operating system.
Dragon Dictate for Mac[edit]
Dragon Dictate for Mac 2.0, an upgrade for MacSpeech Dictate, was announced on September 20, 2010 by Nuance Communications, the developer of MacSpeech products. The upgrade incorporates some of the features of NaturallySpeaking into the MacSpeech software. Dragon Dictate for Mac lacks other NaturallySpeaking features, such as training mis-recognized words by simply re-typing them using the keyboard. An early review by David Pogue notes,
I’m thrilled about the power, the control, the speed and the accuracy of Dragon Dictate. It does, however, have some room for improvement.
For example, in the dictation software world, teaching the software to know its location in your text document is a huge challenge. If you never touch the mouse, the program always knows where it is in the text — because it has deposited all that text itself.
But if you click to edit somewhere, it’s blind. It no longer knows where it is in the document.
In Windows, Nuance has used some clever tricks to overcome this problem in the most important programs, like Word and Outlook. On the Mac, however, the program has no idea what you’ve done manually, by clicking. So you can say something like “select fishmonger,” and the program correctly selects that word. But if you then say “italicize that” or “capitalize that,” the program operates on the wrong words, italicizing or capping something a mile away from the selection. Bizarre.
(This problem doesn’t happen in TextEdit or Dictate’s own included word processor.)[2]
In October 2018 Nuance announced that it was dropping Macintosh support for its products.[3]
See also[edit]
Notable users[edit]
Peter David - American writer of comic books, novels, television, movies and video games. David began using DragonDictate following his stroke in December 2012.[4][5]
References[edit]
- ^Nuance - Dragon for Mac
- ^Finally, Professional Dictation Software for the Mac David Pogue, September 23, 2010
- ^[1] Mac users burned after Nuance drops Dragon speech to text softwareOctober 30, 2018
- ^David, Kathleen (January 15, 2013). 'Your Semi Daily Peter David Report for Jan 15 2012'. peterdavid.net.
- ^'Peter David, Post-Stroke, Returns Home'. startrek.com. February 11, 2013.
External links[edit]
- Official website for Nuance Communications
The DragonDictate / Speech Recognition FAQ— (OBSOLETE: Last modified April 9, 1996 at 8:02:31 AM EDT (= 12:02 pm UTC))
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