It’s been over 2 years since Dragon 6 was released but it still has bugs. As with previous Dragon releases the speech recognition is excellent but the stability is problematic.
My suggestion is to stay with Dragon version 5 if you own it. It strikes the best balance between accuracy and stability. However, if you are running the latest version of Dragon for Mac 6, here are some tips on how to get it working with the least amount of spinning beach balls.
Looking for a review of Version 6? Click here!
Today Dragon Dictate Version 5 (renamed “Dragon for Mac”) was released. It’s a major upgrade from Nuance who are the creators of Dragon Naturally Speaking. They have flagged the importance of this release with the name change from ‘Dragon Dictate’ to simply ‘Dragon for Mac’. It looks different and it feels different, my overall my initial response is… it’s the best and worst version of Dragon so far. Worst because it crashes a lot. The best because of the design and accuracy.
SUMMARY:
The Good: Incredibly accurate. Fast. Looks great. Does not require significant time to be trained.
The Bad: Slow to Load. Problems with capitalisation and spacing.
The Ugly: Crashes a lot. Unstable. Does not work with Microsoft Office 2016.
Regular readers of Macintoshhowto.com will know that one of my favourite pieces of software is Dragon Dictate for Macintosh. Well the latest version, ‘Dragon for Mac’, appeared today at nuance.com. Check out my review of here.
I just purchased it but there are a few different prices around!
The built-in Mavericks OS X speech recognition is a good piece of Voice recognition software to give you a taste of what speech recognition is like, but not as good as Dragon Dictate. This is mainly due to the complete lack of any correction capability. Here’s how it compares to Dragon Naturally Speaking, and how to enable the ‘Enhanced Dictation’ Mode which makes it a lot faster.
If you buy Dragon Dictate it comes with a built-in Microphone that will do the job, but if you buy the download version you’ll need to buy your own microphone.
Here are some of the options you have. Continue reading ⟩
[This article was written in 2010. For a more recent of Dragon click here.]
I’ve been waiting for almost 10 years for Dragon Naturally Speaking to arrive on the Macintosh! And finally it’s here – Dragon Dictate. Continue reading ⟩
With Dragon NaturallySpeaking the only option was to purchase it in Australia because there was a special Australian edition which was made using the Australian accent.
With Macspeech Dictate however, the US version comes with Australian accent, so you can buy the normal version of MacSpeech Dictate from the US for about $200 ($100 less than Australia) and it will still work here.
It comes with USA, UK and Australian versions built-in. So the cheapest way is to buy the US version here and choose ‘digital download’ so you don’t get charged shipping.
Other posts on Speech recognition:
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