Nuance Dragon For Mac

Dragon Software For Mac Download
Nuance Dragon For Mac

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DragonDictate, Dragon Dictate, or Dragon for Mac is proprietary speech recognition software. The older program, DragonDictate, was originally developed by Dragon Systems for Microsoft Windows. It has now been replaced by Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows, and has since been acquired by Nuance Communications. Dragon Dictate for Mac 2.0 (originally named MacSpeech Dictate^[1]) is supported only on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Nuance's other products for Mac include MacSpeech Scribe.

Original DragonDictate[edit]

DragonDictate for Windows was the original speech recognition application from Dragon Systems and used discrete speech where the user must pause between speaking each word. The first version, 1.0 was available only through a few distribution and support partners. It included a Shurecardioid microphone headset. Later it was replaced by Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which allows continuous speech recognition and correction and training of words via the keyboard. NaturallySpeaking remains a Windows-only program, and since 2016 distributes in Version 15. DragonDictate for Windows is still available but has not been updated since Windows 98 was the current operating system.

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Dragon Professional Individual supports Nuance-approved digital voice recorders and smart phones for advanced recording functionality and can automatically transcribe the audio files to text back at your PC. It leverages all the accuracy improvements gained from the state-of-the-art speech recognition engine for fewer post-corrections. Alternatives to Nuance Dragon for Windows, Web, Mac, Linux, Software as a Service (SaaS) and more. Filter by license to discover only free or Open Source alternatives. This list contains a total of 25+ apps similar to Nuance Dragon. List updated: 5:34:00 PM. We earn commissions if you shop through some of the links on this page. Nuance articles on MacRumors.com. Nuance this week announced that it is discontinuing Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, effective two days ago on Monday, October 22, 2018.

Dragon Dictate for Mac[edit]

Dragon Dictate for Mac 2.0, an upgrade for MacSpeech Dictate, was announced on September 20, 2010 by Nuance Communications, the developer of MacSpeech products. The upgrade incorporates some of the features of NaturallySpeaking into the MacSpeech software. Dragon Dictate for Mac lacks other NaturallySpeaking features, such as training mis-recognized words by simply re-typing them using the keyboard. An early review by David Pogue notes,

I’m thrilled about the power, the control, the speed and the accuracy of Dragon Dictate. It does, however, have some room for improvement.

For example, in the dictation software world, teaching the software to know its location in your text document is a huge challenge. If you never touch the mouse, the program always knows where it is in the text — because it has deposited all that text itself.

But if you click to edit somewhere, it’s blind. It no longer knows where it is in the document.

In Windows, Nuance has used some clever tricks to overcome this problem in the most important programs, like Word and Outlook. On the Mac, however, the program has no idea what you’ve done manually, by clicking. So you can say something like “select fishmonger,” and the program correctly selects that word. But if you then say “italicize that” or “capitalize that,” the program operates on the wrong words, italicizing or capping something a mile away from the selection. Bizarre.

(This problem doesn’t happen in TextEdit or Dictate’s own included word processor.)^[2]

Dragon Software For Mac Download

In October 2018 Nuance announced that it was dropping Macintosh support for its products.^[3]Portal 2 - the final hours download free.

Notable users[edit]

Peter David - American writer of comic books, novels, television, movies and video games. David began using DragonDictate following his stroke in December 2012.^[4]^[5]

References[edit]

^Nuance - Dragon for Mac
^Finally, Professional Dictation Software for the Mac David Pogue, September 23, 2010
^[1] Mac users burned after Nuance drops Dragon speech to text softwareOctober 30, 2018
^David, Kathleen (January 15, 2013). 'Your Semi Daily Peter David Report for Jan 15 2012'. peterdavid.net.
^'Peter David, Post-Stroke, Returns Home'. startrek.com. February 11, 2013.

External links[edit]

Official website for Nuance Communications

Scourgebringer.

Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DragonDictate&oldid=975207927'

In October 2018, Nuance announced that it has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac and will support it for only 90 days from activation in the US or 180 days in the rest of the world. The continuous speech-to-text software was widely considered to be the gold standard for speech recognition, and Nuance continues to develop and sell the Windows versions of Dragon Home, Dragon Professional Individual, and various profession-specific solutions.

This move is a blow to professional users—such as doctors, lawyers, and law enforcement—who depended on Dragon for dictating to their Macs, but the community most significantly affected are those who can control their Macs only with their voices.

What about Apple’s built-in accessibility solutions? macOS does support voice dictation, although my experience is that it’s not even as good as dictation in iOS, much less Dragon Professional Individual. Some level of voice control of the Mac is also available via Dictation Commands, but again, it’s not as powerful as what was available from Dragon Professional Individual.

TidBITS reader Todd Scheresky is a software engineer who relies on Dragon Professional Individual for his work because he’s a quadriplegic and has no use of his arms. He has suggested several ways that Apple needs to improve macOS speech recognition to make it a viable alternative to Dragon Professional Individual:

Support for user-added custom words: Every profession has its own terminology and jargon, which is part of why there are legal, medical, and law enforcement versions of Dragon for Windows. Scheresky isn’t asking Apple to provide such custom vocabularies, but he needs to be able to add custom words to the vocabulary to carry out his work.
Support for speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition: Currently, macOS’s speech recognition is speaker-independent, which means that it works pretty well for everyone. But Scheresky believes it needs to become speaker-dependent, so it can learn from your corrections to improve recognition accuracy. Also, Apple’s speech recognition isn’t continuous—it works for only a few minutes before stopping and needing to be reinvoked.
Support for cursor positioning and mouse button events: Although Scheresky acknowledges that macOS’s Dictation Commands are pretty good and provide decent support for text cursor positioning, macOS has nothing like Nuance’s MouseGrid, which divides the screen into a 3-by-3 grid and enables the user to zoom in to a grid coordinate, then displaying another 3-by-3 grid to continue zooming. Nor does Apple have anything like Nuance’s mouse commands for moving and clicking the mouse pointer.

When Scheresky complained to Apple’s accessibility team about macOS’s limitations, they suggested the Switch Control feature, which enables users to move the pointer (along with other actions) by clicking a switch. He talks about this in a video.

Unfortunately, although Switch Control would let Scheresky control a Mac using a sip-and-puff switch or a head switch, such solutions would be both far slower than voice and a literal pain in the neck. There are some better alternatives for mouse pointer positioning:

Dedicated software, in the form of a $35 app called iTracker.
An off-the-shelf hack using Keyboard Maestro and Automator.
An expensive head-mounted pointing device, although the SmartNav is $600 and the HeadMouse Nano and TrackerPro are both about $1000. It’s also not clear how well they interface with current versions of macOS.

Regardless, if Apple enhanced macOS’s voice recognition in the ways Scheresky suggests, it would become significantly more useful and would give users with physical limitations significantly more control over their Macs… and their lives. If you’d like to help, Scheresky suggests submitting feature request feedback to Apple with text along the following lines (feel free to copy and paste it):

Because Nuance has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, it is becoming difficult for disabled users to use the Mac. Please enhance macOS speech recognition to support user-added custom words, speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition that learns from user corrections to improve accuracy, and cursor positioning and mouse button events.

Thank you for your consideration!