I am starting an FAQ about dragon for users who would like to keep their current version of Dragon going for as long as they can. (Dragon have closed down all their technical support, including their old forums.) Read on for details.
Continue reading ⟩Now that dragon speech recognition is no longer available on Macintosh computers I have not been able to find a good dictation solution for OSX. Built-in Apple dictation is woeful and Siri is not great. So my go-to solution for dictating emails is to use Google assistant on my Android phone.
The main problem I am having when dictating with Google assistant is that I have not been able to work out how to dictate a new line. I have tried saying “new line” but it just types the words “new line”. Today I accidentally stumbled across something that seems to work.
If you say “full stop new paragraph” it puts a full stop and then follows it up with a new paragraph!
SUMMARY: Dragon Version 6 is problematic with High Sierra. This article describes somewhat of a fix – ‘reset’ the Dragon preferences and dictate into Text Edit.
According to Nuance Dragon 6.0.8 is compatible with High Sierra. But in High Sierra the ‘scratch that’ command doesn’t work. The correction window doesn’t work either. These are pretty crucial to an everyday user of Dragon. So unless you absolutely need to be running High Sierra, I’d suggest you stick with Sierra and run Dragon 6.0.7 until those issues are resolved.
According to Nuance Dragon version 6.0.8 is compatible with High Sierra 10.13. Unfortunately High Sierra (10.13) still has some unresolved issues with Dragon so I suggest you stay with Dragon 6.0.7 and OS X 10.12
UPDATE 2/2/2018: See this post for a fix to this bug.
Today Nuance released Dragon version 6.02. I’d love to be able to review Dragon version 6.02 right now but because the major problem with Dragon is stability it is something that I can’t just review in 24 hours. I will be giving Dragon 6.02 a good workout over the coming few days and I will give you a report as soon as I can. Hopefully it’s the version that we have been waiting for. But in the meantime, I have been playing around with version 6.01 for about four weeks and I can give you some thoughts about it.
Nuance just released an update to Dragon for Mac yesterday. What’s more, I received a personal phone call from Jeff Lieman, the manager of Engineering at Nuance, encouraging me to try out and review the new version. He was very generous with his time and chatted with me about some of the new features of Dragon 6 and how Dragon are working with various companies to bring even better integration to Dragon. He was very concerned about the bugs that are in Dragon 6 and pretty keen to get them sorted ASAP. It sounds like the number of problems in the latest release caught them by surprise. He sounded concerned. But the proof will be in how well Nuance can get the bugs fixed and give us a stable working version.
I’ve installed 6.01. It’s crashed twice which is disappointing but better than it was last week. I’ll be giving it a good test drive over the next week – stay tuned for an update.
UPDATE 15/10/2016: I have now been using Dragon 6.0.1 for a couple of weeks, you can read my thoughts here.
UPDATE 28/9/2016: I received a personal phone call from Jeff Lieman, the manager of Engineering at Nuance, encouraging me to try out and review the new version, Dragon 6.01, which was released today. I will try it out over the next few weeks and give you an update.
I’m so disappointed with the latest version of Dragon for Mac 6 released yesterday that I’m not even going to write a review. I will make some comments though for those who might be thinking of upgrading.
Dragon for Mac 6 (renamed Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, v6) crashes every few minutes. It does crazy mistakes like “againnâ€, “consistsnt†and “won’tt”. There have been a couple of times it has taken complete control of my computer and spat out endless garbage like ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ
I cannot even force quit it because it is an invisible application. I cannot go into activity monitor to quit because I have lost control of my keyboard. I’ve installed it on my Macbook Air but it’s too unstable to put on my main Mac.
Here are some comments from actual users:
“profound disappointment.” Kevin
“this version of Dragon is so much garbage that I thought I might be able to warn others” Zach
“Upgrading to dragon 6 is the worse decision I have made in a long time.” Max
“shouldn’t Nuance be beta-testing new releases with users so these bugs get squashed before a general release?” Jon
“I find it surprising that this version has been released when it clearly contains so many errors.” Peter
“I am also frustrated with version 6, and like Zach, I’ve been a user since the MacSpeech iListen days.” Stephen
“Now instead of just messing up and quitting, the 6.0 version just stops working and gives you a spinning beach ball.” Mary
“getting a little tiresome” adsub
“very disappointed that Nuance would put out such an unstable version.” Mark
“it is not a positive experience.” David
“Getting Dragon version 6 for the Macintosh to work for me was a huge pain.” Fletch
“What good is improved UI when the guts don’t work.” Andrew
“Big promises for Dragon 6, but a complete failure on delivery. Don’t buy it!” Tersh
“It has crashed more than 10 times in 6 days in the course of doing very ordinary dictation tasks.” Steve
“by far the worst release I’ve seen as far as bugs and erratic behavior in a program version that’s virtually useless” Mark
“I feel like Charlie Brown, each time they come out with a new version I think that it will be different but then they pull the football away.”
And my favourite:
“The only “Deep Learning” taking place here is that I must not allow myself to be ripped off yet again!” Arnold
We know we are desperate if people are suggesting solutions like this:
“why don’t you try Dragon for Windows (using a Windows bootcamp partition or a virtual machine)?” Marius
I am very disappointed because previously this was one of my favourite pieces of software.
You can read more on the Nuance customer forums here.
A final note, be wary of reviews like this one that are overly positive – they are selling the software!
The upgraded version of Dragon Dictate (Dragon Professional) version 6 is due to be released any time soon. There are still many bugs in version 5 that the various upgrades have not fixed ye yet. Indeed many of them are a hang-over from version 4. What are the main bugs we need to test the new version for? Here is my list. Feel free to add any more. I will test it as soon as my pre-order is available! Continue reading ⟩
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