Dragon Dictate 2.0 for the Mac
I have been a bit harsh on MacSpeech in the past, but since then they have been bought by Nuance (makers of the excellent Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation software for Windows). If there is anyone who can finally release a decent dictation application for the Mac, it’s them. And recently they released the rebranded Dragon Dictate 2.0. Looking forward to finally not having to launch Windows in Parallels Desktop every time I want to dictate something, this of course filled me with much joy and hope. But judging by MacSpeech’s own forums this version has caused a lot of problems for many people, first and foremost because of a bug which crashes the application when you launch it! After making absolutely sure that I can indeed get my money back within the first 30 days if the application is not working properly and am therefore in no way running the risk of giving even more money to MacSpeech for a faulty product, I bought and installed it. The aforementioned bug was easily avoided by leaving the start-up mode to “Idle - Microphone off”.
Here are the results of the first test:
She sells seashells by the seashore.
Impressive. How about this one:
How much would be debuted chuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood How much would with a booby-trapped truck if it would chop the truck would How much would really would truck truck even good truck woodchuck would
The first one was pretty close, the rest not so much, but in all fairness it’s a very tough phrase. And all in all the accuracy is outstanding. Even better than Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, which is only natural considering it is using the same underlying engine as Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11. The editing commands are at first confusing for someone who is used to Dragon NaturallySpeaking (when I started this post I was actually planning on doing a fair bit of complaining about them), but by now I’m pretty happy about them. There are occasional crashes and bugs, like sometimes leaving out the last character when dictating single words or punctuation (which, in the latter case, leads to a whole lot of nothing). But when Nuance fixes those I think we finally, at long last, have a good dictation solution for the Mac.
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