With the release of version three of the
popular speech recognition software Dragon Dictate for Mac, developer Nuance
has added some nice new features and improvements.
We’ve used Dragon Dictate for some time now
to compensate for your atrocious typing skills. We’re actually using it to
write this review, and find it extremely useful in the large number of emails
we have to write every day.
Nuance
Dragon Dictate For Mac 3
Nuance claims a 15 percent improvement in
accuracy over version two. We’re not sure about the 15 percent but we have
noticed a significant improvement.
We’re spending less time going to the
correction window, and have a feeling that we can speak more quickly and that
the words appear more quickly on the screen. So Nuance has certainly tweaked
the recognition engine.
It also seems quicker to show correction
alternatives and to implement choices. Also, the alternatives suggested in the
recognition window seem more, shall we say, sensible. Some previous
alternatives bordered on hilarious.
Nuance also claims that Dictate can be used
in more applications. For the best accuracy it has always been recommended to
dictate into a TextEdit or a Word document. When working in Pages in the previous
version random letters would sometimes appear and formatting control would
often be lost. We’re noticing a marked improvement in this aspect.
The
alternatives suggested in the recognition window seem more, shall we say,
sensible. Some previous alternatives bordered on hilarious
Another new feature is support for digital
voice recorders. We installed the free Dragon Recorder App on an iPod touch,
plugged in a microphone and began dictating. When we finished we connected the
iPod to a Mac via iTunes and transferred our recording to the desktop.
Here’s where it gets harder on a Mac. On a
PC, premium versions of Dragon have transcription ability built in. On the Mac
you need a separate program, MacSpeech Scribe.
We installed Scribe, selected our recording
and hit Transcription. And there is what we said – 100 percent accurate. We
repeated the process with the same result. Pretty impressive.
We’re often asked if it is possible to
transcribe interviews. The answer, unfortunately, is not really. Dictate relies
on hearing the voice of one user at a time.
Dictate
3 allows you to choose your preferred forms of word (eg, colour/colour) or
phrases and actually learns your style from the changes you make
There is, however, a workaround. Open a
blank Dictate document, have your interview available on headphones and simply
dictate what you hear. Not a perfect solution but much quicker than typing. And
if you’re part of the interview you can use Scribe to transcribe your part.
Dictate 3 allows you to choose your preferred
forms of word (eg, colour/colour) or phrases and actually learns your style
from the changes you make. And you still have the nice feature from version two
of vocabulary training.
Simply select documents that you have
written which you fell reflect your style and ask Dictate to add all new words
to its vocabulary. You can also add individual words manually.
Other improvements are support for wideband
Bluetooth and a neat little interactive tutorial which you access through the
Help menu. For new users setup is really easy and Dictate had no problem in
picking up voice profiles from the previous version.
Our buying advice.
Even before version three came out we’d
made the decision to use Dictate whenever we needed to write more than a few
words. The new version is certainly more intuitive, noticeably faster and more
accurate. Highly recommended.
