Dragon Naturally Speaking arrives on the Macintosh!

Posted 1 year, 2 months ago at 9:26 pm. 7 comments

Ever since I first used Dragon Naturally Speaking Version 4 in 2000, I have been waiting for it to be released on the Macintosh.  Well  it’s finally arrived, it’s called “MacSpeech Dictate”, and it’s powered by Dragon. Unfortunately there are still a few hiccups. My advice is if you have been using speech recognition already – Viavoice or Ilisten, then make the switch – it’s an improvement. But if you are not currently using speech recognition, wait a little longer. It’s not quite there yet, and the adjustment to speech recognition combined with some bugs makes for a steep learning curve.

 

I was an early adopter of speech recognition. As a mac user, I purchased a PC which I used just for speech recognition! I would copy the dictated files to a thumb drive edit them on my Mac. Not too long later, Viavoice arrived on the mac, and while not as good as dragon, it was usable. I’ve been using IBM ViaVoice to dictate all my sermons for the past 6 years, but ViaVoice is frustrating. Its accuracy is not as good as Dragon NaturallySpeaking and I used to spend as much time correcting the mistakes as I did dictating.

In terms of dictation and recognition, MacSpeech Dictate is absolutely fantastic. The accuracy is impressive  and it does not take much training.  In fact I think I was reading stories for about five  minutes and then I was ready to Dictate. It’s a very stable application,  unlike IBM ViaVoice which was frequently crashing.

It integrates very easily so that you can dictate into any Macintosh program. IBM ViaVoice was meant to do this but in reality whenever you were dictating into anything other than the ViaVoice speakpad it was tediously slow.

So why is it “not quite as good as Dragon NaturallySpeaking”?  A few reasons. The most annoying is that there is a bug in it so that if you correct anything with your mouse and keyboard, it gets out of sync and loses it’s place, and you can’t keep dictating. So you must dictate by commands, which is tedious to say the least.

One of my favourite features of Dragon NaturallySpeaking was the correction window where the program automatically taught itself from your mistakes. When it misrecognised a word you could say  ”correct that” and type in the  correct word, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking would automatically train itself so that whenever you spoke that word again it would get it right.  

When  Dictate  makes a mistake it just keeps misrecognizing the word, and you can’t re-train it.  The manual promises that this correction feature will come in an update – let’s hope it’s soon.   

If you have been using ViaVoice or iListen, then you will be blown away by the accuracy of dictate. On the other hand, if you have come across from Dragon NaturallySpeaking you will be taking a slight step backwards due to the lack of automatic correction, and the buginess of the manual correction.  

I had one small hiccup installing because I made the wrong selection of microphone, and I went looking on the support pages of the Australian and American resellers – none of them were particularly helpful, but I ended up finding the answer in the installation manual!    If all else fails read the manual I guess.

Purchasing.    

With Dragon NaturallySpeaking the only option was to purchase it in Australia because there was a special Australian edition which was made using the Australian accent. 

With Macspeech Dictate, the US version comes with Australian accent,  so you can buy MacSpeech Dictate from the US for about $180, $110 less than the cheapest price in Australia. 

In conclusion, it’s a very nice piece of software. With it’s current lack of features and bugs, it’s really should be a beta version. In my opinion, it’s worth $100, not yet worth $200, and at $300, I think you’d only buy it if you really needed it.