I’ve never been a fast typist (about 40wpm), and Dragon Dictate spews out words much faster than I ever could. I try to use the program because often times my hands get a little sore from daily typing. You will easily get frustrated with these programs if you don’t take the time to clearly ennunciate your words and sentences. And that’s the key to using Dragon Dictate or Dragon NaturallySpeaking. (Note, however, Mac OS X comes with a similar speech recognition program for computer navigation, but not text dictation.) But all this takes practice. These speech recognition programs can be very useful for dictating notes, verbally transcribing typed text, and navigating applications and other items on your computer.
The PC version is called “NaturallySpeaking,” but naturally dictating writing is, well, not always natural. As I wrote in my January ’09 review of MacSpeech Dictate, dictating writing can be more challenging than manually typing text.
Though the new features are a big plus, they won't make it that much easier to use the program. Much of the same commands in the old version exist in the new one. On the service, there’s not much difference between Dragon Dictate and MacSpeech Dictate. The 1.22GB download and upgrade went smoothly, and the program crashed only once. I spent several hours yesterday using Dragon Dictate. I finally found a YouTube video tutorial that successfully demonstrates how to use MacSpeech Dictate, as well as Dragon Dictate, with a built-in mic. You couldn’t even use the built-in microphone of your Mac. The latter feature will be a much welcomed upgrade, for MacSpeech Dictate was heavily criticized for only allowing the use of a single, dedicated microphone. Other features include verbal navigation of your mouse and the ability to use more than one microphone. “Taking advantage,” the company claims, “of the powerful Text-to-Speech capabilities built into Mac OS X.” You can use commands to have dictated text read back to you: “‘Read/Proofreadtext,’ ‘Read/Proofread The Selection’ and ‘Read/Proofread Document.’”
Other new features include easier editing for commands such as “Select text,” “Delete text,” Train text,” “Capitalize text.” In other words, you can verbally select text and issue a verbal command to activate them.ĭragon Dictate also includes upgrades in proofreading. In its press release, Nuance, maintains that Dragon Dictate has improved performance, powered by the “same state-of-the-art technology used by Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 for PC. This week Nuance, the developer of the popular speech recognition program, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 for PC, released an update to its Mac version, MacSpeech Dictate-renamed Dragon Dictate for Mac.
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