The point of this feature is to allow you to record speeches or lectures. You only need to train 60 seconds of speech to use the transcription feature. But this was a live recording, with audience laughter at times, and an improvised text. There were so many errors that it might take nearly as long to correct them as to transcribe the entire piece. For the Garrison Keillor monologue, however, results were poor. Dragon Dictate did very well with this, making few recognition errors. The first recording was studio quality, and it features someone reading a short story, slowly and carefully. I tried this with two podcasts: one from the New Yorker: Fiction, where Jennifer Egan reads a story by Mary Gatskill, and another from Prairie Home Companion, with Garrison Keillor giving a News from Lake Wobegon monologue. Dragon Dictate 4 goes one step further, allowing this feature to transcribe any single speaker, after a brief training process. I’ve left that in the middle, as it was with the previous version.)ĭragon Dictate 3 added a transcription feature that lets you record yourself on a dictaphone and use the app to turn your voice into words. (In the Preferences, there’s a Recognition tab, with a slider that lets you choose between Speed and Accuracy.
#Dragon voice recognition for mac mac
I’m running the app on the same Mac mini I used for the previous review, and it’s noticeably faster there is no lag between the time I pause to allow Dragon Dictate to type my words and their appearance in my documents, and this is with the same settings as I used with Dragon Dictate 3. Nuance says that Dragon Dictate 4 offers “Higher performance with drastically reduced latency and faster editing,” and this is certainly the case.
#Dragon voice recognition for mac software
For all three of these apps, you can dictate and edit without getting the software confused when you use other apps, if you do any editing, things can get messy. As always, you can dictate into almost any application, but Dragon Dictate works best when you dictate into its own Note Pad it also works very well with Microsoft Word or Pages ‘09. Dragon Dictate 4 also lets you mix dictation and editing in Pages 4.3-that’s Pages ‘09, not the latest version. Not everyone will appreciate some of the new features in Dragon Dictate 4, but if you use Gmail on the Web for your email, a new browser extension lets you manage Gmail using voice commands. Using SpeechWare’s USB 6-in-1 TableMike, with the boom peeking out below my Thunderbolt display, I’ve been dictating articles and blog posts, and read a number of articles from the Web, using Dragon Dictate 4, and in all cases, the quality of the recognition was excellent.ĭragon Dictate 4 looks exactly like its predecessor, but there’s something new under the hood. Recognition quality is radically improved over Dragon Dictate 3. But with version 4, I now feel, for the first time, that I can dictate without paying too much attention to the words on my screen, and go back and edit after I’ve finished speaking. I’ve seen, over the years, how Nuance has refined and tweaked its speech recognition engine. Dragon Dictate 4 is now available, and, while the list of new features doesn’t look impressive, there’s something new under the hood.