Comments on: Dragon Naturally Speaking arrives on the Macintosh!

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:54:35 +0000

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.

By: Dick

Dick — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:46:35 +0000

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

By: Marti

Marti — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:34 +0000

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.

By: admin

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:57:14 +0000

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

By: Jean Williams

Jean Williams — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:52:03 +0000

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?

By: admin

admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 02:35:00 +0000

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.

By: Anne J Robinson

Anne J Robinson — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:01:54 +0000

+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!

By: dennis

dennis — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:24:44 +0000

does anyone know if dictate will transcribe prerecorded files like dragon does?

By: admin

admin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:27:56 +0000

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.

By: mary

mary — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:18:52 +0000

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