MacSpeech Dictate Is Now Dragon Dictate for Mac

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.

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. 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.

Dragon Dictate also includes upgrades in proofreading. “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 features include verbal navigation of your mouse and the ability to use more than one microphone. 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. You couldn’t even use the built-in microphone of your Mac. 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.

My Assessement

I spent several hours yesterday using Dragon Dictate. The 1.22GB download and upgrade went smoothly, and the program crashed only once.

On the service, there’s not much difference between Dragon Dictate and MacSpeech Dictate. Much of the same commands in the old version exist in the new one.

Though the new features are a big plus, they won't make it that much easier to use the program. As I wrote in my January ’09 AppleMatters.com review of MacSpeech Dictate, dictating writing can be more challenging than manually typing text. The PC version is called “NaturallySpeaking,” but naturally dictating writing is, well, not always natural.

These speech recognition programs can be very useful for dictating notes, verbally transcribing typed text, and navigating applications and other items on your computer. (Note, however, Mac OS X comes with a similar speech recognition program for computer navigation, but not text dictation.) But all this takes practice. And that’s the key to using Dragon Dictate or Dragon NaturallySpeaking. You will easily get frustrated with these programs if you don’t take the time to clearly ennunciate your words and sentences.

I try to use the program because often times my hands get a little sore from daily typing. I’ve never been a fast typist (about 40wpm), and Dragon Dictate spews out words much faster than I ever could. However, the program can slow down the writing process, simply because you have to formulate in your head what you’re going to say/dictate before you say it, whereas with manual typing, you can formulate thoughts as you type. For some users, “naturally speaking,” may come easily, while others will find dictating text very challenging.

Dragon Dictate for Mac is $199.99 and $49 for an upgrade, which can be acquired via Internet download, or a purchase of the boxed version available for delivery after October 1st. The program requires Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac and a compatible Dictate microphone.



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