I was an early adopter of speech recognition. Despite being a long time Apple user user, in 1999 I purchased my first PC just to run Dragon Naturally Speaking. I would dictate to the PC and then copy the dictated files over to my Mac on a thumb drive! Dragon Naturally Speaking was by far the best dictation software but it was not available for the Appel platform.
Not too long later, Viavoice arrived on the Macintosh. It was not as good as Dragon but did the job. I used IBM ViaVoice for the next 6 years, with a brief but disappointing trial of iListen in the middle of that time.
So I’ve been waiting for almost 10 years for Dragon NaturallySpeaking to arrive on the Macintosh! And finally it’s here – Macspeech Dictate.
‘At the core of MacSpeech Dictate is the world-renowned speech recognition engine, Dragon NaturallySpeaking.’
After using Macspeech Dictate since it’s release 2 years ago, I can say MacSpeech Dictate is easily the best dictation software for the Mac. It is now up to version 1.5 and with each new release it keeps getting better. For those who for many years were limping along with iListen or Via Voice – you won’t believe the difference! The latest version of Macspeech Dictate achieves almost full accuracy with just 5-10 minutes of training.
There are a few (small) weaknesses. One is that every time it boots up you need to click to select your voice profile – it doesn’t have a default option.
Another weakness is that although the accuracy seems on par with Dragon naturally speaking, the learning as you dictate is not quite as good. With Dragon NaturallySpeaking if I retrained a word it would never mistake it again. I could even retrain it with words that I pronounced badly, so that it would learn my bad pronunciation. With Macspeech Dictate sometimes I have to retrain a difficult word five or six times and even then it doesn’t learn it exactly how I said it – thinks. So there must be some difference between the way Dragon Naturally Speaking and Macspeech Dictate handle the retraining of words.
That said, it’s a fantastic product. I use it every day, and I’d totally recommend that you try it out if you do a lot of typing. At the very least find a friend who has a copy and give it a trial! That’s what I did 10 years ago with Dragon Naturally Speaking and I was hooked.
If you live in the US It’s available directly from MacSpeech for $199, or people from Australia can grab it from Amazon who ship internationally.
There’s also a wireless version for $299 but if you really want the absolute best option, I’d go for the standard Macspeech Dictate version and buy your own separate top of the line wireless headset - I have written a separate article here on the best microphone to buy.
NOTE: You can read my older and less flattering reviews of the earlier versions of Macspeech Dictate here.
True, Dictate is a major improvement over iListen but that is because it is a port of the Windows based Dragon Dictate speech technology. Because iListen never really worked as promised, Dictate should have been offered as a free upgrade to all iListen users.
It seems MacSpeech is getting a great deal of heat over customer service issues, product crashes and defective install disks. One attorney was suggesting a class action suite be considered in the MacWorld forum.
MacSpeech has an opportunity to finally offer Mac users a speech to text product close to that available to Windows users for the last several years. Lets hope their limited staff and resources don’t cause them to drop the ball.
Given the news stories circulating at the moment concerning the concentration of seriously dangerous bacteria living on our keyboards… business should boom!
I’m going to disinfect my hands now.
I just received my upgraded version of ilisten. It’s a brand new version of dictate with it’s own serial number, but without the headset.
[...] this previous review of MacSpeech Dictate I mentioned that as good as MacSpeech Dictate was, there were still a few [...]
Just curious if the updates every came? I’ve been using Dragon on the PC for a couple years now. There’s a long over due update for version 10 coming this week for Dragon (Version 10 of Dragon is the equivalent of MacSpeech Dictate which deubted about 8 months earlier).
Anyway, there have been complaints from PC users that the updates weren’t fast enough on this one, and I’m curious how it feels in the Mac community….
Yep updates coming every few months. We are now up to version 1.3.
Do you mean there is now a McSpeech Dictate version 1.3 available?
Is this version available in German language, for use on Mac OSX, version 10.5.5?
I am working on a book and interview many people for an hour each. I am a Mac user and do not want to buy a pc just for a good solid speech recognition software.
It has been a while since this post was created – a year and some change. What program do you suggest I purchase and why.
Is the Dragon speak on PC that much better than anything I can get on a mac. I don’t want to spend many hours tweaking text. Thanks M
Macspeech dictate is very good, but it won’t recognise their speech, only yours. It needs to be trained to the voice it is recognising, and requires you to speak clearly. I think it’s as good as the PC version now in terms of accuracy.
does anyone know if dictate will transcribe prerecorded files like dragon does?
+1 for dennis’ question.
Curiosity is burning a hole in my brain on this one, and it doesn’t say anywhere on the MacSpeech site that it handles pre-recorded interviews.
I have a thick stack of reels to transcribe, and I would FAR prefer training a robot to handle the transcription than I would training (and paying) a bubblegum popping employee.
$200 one-time up front is a far better value equation to me than a recurring bill for $25.00/audio hour * hundreds of hours of audio hours.
Keep me posted, Gents and ladies!
There is no ability to open an audio file and have macspeech dictate recognise it.
You can’t open a file off your portable recorder and have Mac speech dictate transcribe it like what would happen with Dragon NaturallySpeaking on the PC.
The only way that I can see around this would be to play an audio file from your Mac and then feed it back into the input of Mac speech dictate, perhaps with some software like sound flower, or the old-fashioned way with an audio lead connected from your mac’s sound out to the sound in connector.
But keep in mind that the audio quality has to be very good and it have to be speaking straight into the microphone, and it certainly would not be able to do two voices like in an interview.
Have they worked out the bug in Dictate, such as you described here?: “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.”
Also, have they added the “correction window” yet to Dictate?
Please advise. I’m a Mac user, but I’m on the verge of buying a PC just to be able to use Dragon. Thoughts?
Yes they have improved it dramatically form the first version, see the updates post here:
http://macintoshhowto.com/software/how-to-dictate-into-your-macintosh.html
I have a Mac and work in pharmaceuticals. I travel from account to account long distances in my car and would like to use a handheld digital recording device that I could attach to my Mac and have it transcribe to text. Sounds to me that, unlike Dragon, one cannot use an external recording device with MacSpeech Dictate.
If this is correct, would it be feasible to load a Windows Operating System and Microsoft Office on my Mac and just go ahead and use Dragon Naturally Speaking? Would this work correctly and would it allow me to use an external digital recorder?
I am fairly new to the Mac world and don’t want to buy and be stuck with a whole bunch of Windows software that doesn’t work on my Mac. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
NO NO NO don’t do that!
Go for Macspeech Scribe.
Ditto the Q from Marti for me!
I’m about 2/3 converted to my Mac, but still want assurance of best way to do speech recognition on the Mac (especially with digital recorder as the input source!!)
Note: Currently quite happy with Dragon ver 9 on my PC Laptop.
Waiting and hoping!!
Thanks
Macspeech scribe does this.
I noticed this tonight, Aussie time, in The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW). It may be of interest to some recent questions!
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/12/08/dragon-dictation-comes-to-the-iphone-wow/
Dragon Dictation Comes To The iPhone – and TUAW seems quite impressed.
It works OK as a proof of concept but IMHO not too useful. You still have to use your hands too much to paste the dictation into the app you want or to email it etc. It’s more of a text input for the iphone than a dictaphone for ideas.
Mac-speech dictate is hands down the best dictation software for the Mac. The out-of-the-box Mac speech dictate does not transcribe from a recorder or audio file, but there is a separate version called ‘scribe’ that will take AIFF files, MP3 etc and convert them to text! ( you still need to train it beforehand with your voice).
Marti, this should help:
Unable to start Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.5 in Windows Vista virtual machine.
Article ID: 4896
Last Review: Sep,29 2009
Author: Daria Taranova
Last updated by: Ivan Chega APPLIES TO:
• Parallels Desktop for Mac 3.0
• Parallels Desktop for Mac 4.0
• Parallels Desktop for Mac 2.0
• Parallels Desktop for Windows & Linux
Symptoms
Error message “This program should not be run in elevated mode” appears on Dragon Naturally Speaking startup.
Cause
Microsoft User Account Control (UAC) doesn’t let you run Dragon Naturally Speaking Administrator when logged on as Administrator.
Resolution
There are two ways to solve the problem:
1. Log on to some non-administrator account and run the program.
2. In the Administrator account, Windows Vista will put the program into elevated mode automatically. So you will need to turn off the UAC, which can be done on the Control Panel. Also, be sure that in the preferences for the program the “Run as Administrator” option is not selected.
I found it at: http://kb.parallels.com/en/4896
[...] my mac need more memory? Dragon Naturally Speaking arrives on the Macintosh! Apr [...]
[...] can read my full review here. [...]
I have been using Dragon for years. I have 10 and 11 is out. I understand that you don’t suggest using Naturally Speaking on a Mac, but since I have a desktop PC, it would be a lot easier and less expensive to just use Dragon Naturally Speaking on both the PC and a Mac laptop I travel with. Have you tried Dragon with the Mac windows app and it did not work, or do you just not like the idea?
I have not tried that – not because it didn’t worn, just I prefer to stay in mac mode. You could check out the dragon forums to see if people have been successful in doing it, I heard there were some problems with the audio quality but there may be a way round that.