iDictate – Digital Voice Blog

The Dragon voice recognition products from Nuance – NaturallySpeaking for Windows & Dragon Dictate for Mac – are not just a useful aid for teachers and educators but are also fast becoming essential tools for learning in our schools and universities for students too. Allowing children to speak their thoughts and not be held back by the speed of their typing which lets creativity flow. Helping children with their spoken diction and instantly showing the correct spelling of words as they are spoken are a huge benefit. That coupled with the fact that students are comfortable using computers it makes sense for schools and universities to be looking at this speech recognition technology. In summary benefits of speech recognition technology for students and educators include:

• Improves core reading and writing skills for students of all abilities
• Helps students with language-based learning disabilities more easily express themselves in writing
• Provides accessibility for teachers and students with physical disabilities that hamper typing
• Bridges English Language Learners’ oral and  written communication skills
• Prepares students to use emerging interfaces in the 21st century workforce
• Enables teachers to prepare more detailed assessments of student work through dictation

This is where we, Dictate Australia, can help as certified Gold Nuance Australia resellers. We can supply site education licences for learning facilities across Australia. This not only opens you up to larger discounts on Nuance pricing but also makes your software asset management more manageable compared to buying odd licences ad hoc. The licensing of Dragon NaturallySpeaking (Windows computers) and Dragon Dictate (for Macs) is slightly different for educational purposes than it is for commercial or government bulk licensing the differences being: More

One of the social media tweaks added to Dragon Dictate, voice recognition for Mac, in its recent upgrade from version 2.0 to 2.5 was the ability to post status messages directly to Facebook and Twitter simply using a voice command. With so many of us using twitter these days it was an obvious add-in to make by Nuance. So just how easy is it to tweet using your voice?

Piece of cake, I just did my first voice tweet and like a new born baby I filmed it for the memories. It’s quick and easy. The steps are:

More

One of the most common searches that end up with visitors landing on my blog is people looking for a trial version of Dragon Dictate for the Mac. Good idea, it is quite a hefty purchase price for some software that most know little about and therefore the cost vs risk factor is high. A trial version would be a good lead into the software and would allow people to have a play, see how accurate it is and become more comfortable before committing to a purchase. Great idea but alas a free trial version is not available.

As a compromise Nuance have just released to the Mac App Store Dragon Express for a cut down, yet still significant price of $US49.99 (AU$51.99). This app is an excellent introduction into voice recognition on the Mac and is essentially a cut down version of Dragon Dictate 2.5 – Nuance’s flagship speech recognition product for the Mac.

So how does it work?

More

Now that we have Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 for Windows and Dragon Dictate 2.5 for Mac fully social in the sense that using them they can both post to Twitter or Facebook using voice only we thought it might be useful to track down some of the Nuance and Dragon related twitter id’s for you to interact with.

More

No, is the short answer. Voice or speech recognition software will only successfully work with one spoken voice and that spoken voice, for best results, needs to have trained the software to understand their voice and style of speaking known as creating a voice profile. Most people who use voice recognition software typically pop on a headset and mic and chat away to their Windows PC or Mac and watch as their voice is magically (or using the Dragon voice recognition engine if you don’t believe in magic) converted to text.

Voice recognition is currently going through a spike in popularity, especially since the release of the iPhone 4S running iOS5 with Siri, which has raised awareness of just how good voice recognition technology has evolved over the last couple of years, Nuance being the company leading the way in this technology on Mac, Windows and now inside iOS5 working closely with Apple.

Because of this everyone now has an iPhone which is capable of recording audio and most who need to capture important meetings or interviews also have a high quality digital voice recorder. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium and Professional edition on Windows and MacSpeech Scribe on the Mac can take recorded audio and transcribe it, that is only for that single trained person who is speaking. So it is understandable that the leap is often made that if it can transcribe one voice it can transcribe many, not so. The technology is not there yet and in my opinion won’t be for quite some time.

More

Dragon NaturallySpeaking from Nuance, currently at version 11.5, can use a digital recording of your spoken voice and transcribe that into text (Premium and Professional versions only), this is commonly referred to as deferred transcription. With so many people now owning either a digital voice recorder and/or an iPhone or iPad with a voice recording app the question is often asked “is the recording quality good enough for use with Dragon NaturallySpeaking?“.

Luckily the nice people at Nuance have a quick and easy way for you to check, via the Nuance Hardware Compatibility website. This site shows compatibility for all Nuance software but you can specifically drill down on Dragon NaturallySpeaking and then look through the Recorders (current) or Recorders (legacy) for older digital voice recorders.

The Nuance Hardware Compatibility website is also worth a visit if you are planning to buy a new microphone or mic and headset combo for use with Dragon Naturally Speaking as these too are listed and given a Dragon accuracy score out of six, the more dragons the better the accuracy. We like the Plantronics DSP-400 and have been promoting that for a few years now. The DSP-400 achieved a six dragon accuracy score and is an excellent all round headset/mic combo which is both Mac and Windows compatible, works with Skype also.

Currently the only universal (iPhone and iPad) voice recording app which is listed as compatible is the awesome Andrea Pure Audio Live Recorder app (found in the Recorders (current) dropdown which achieves five out of six dragons. I have this app on my iPhone 4 running iOS5 and it works beautifully, the app also works on the 3GS iPhone.

With all the flurry of activity over the last week with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) being released along with an upgrade to Dragon Dictate from 2.0 to 2.5 we have had a few calls into our office regarding compatibility of MacSpeech Scribe with Lion.

Nuance have recently posted an update on their website (click here) which is important to read if you are one of these customers:

• Dragon Dictate 2.0 – upgrade to Lion YES
• MacSpeech Dictate 1.5 – upgrade to Lion YES
• MacSpeech Scribe – upgrade to Lion NO

Upgrading to Lion on your Mac should be fine if you are running Dragon Dictate 2.0, I have personally done this and my Dragon Dictate is working without issue. Updating to Lion if you have MacSpeech Dictate 1.5 Nuance also claims should be fine, I have not tried this.

But, if you are a MacSpeech Scribe customer the advice is to not upgrade to Lion from 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

MacSpeech Scribe is the legacy MacSpeech product now maintained by Nuance which allows voice to text from recorded audio only. Personally I am surprised that with Dragon Dictate 2.5 the ability to transcribe from spoken voice AND recorded voice was not included, I am sure this has to have been high on the Nuance Mac teams priority list for some time but as yet is still not there.

Keep an eye on my blog and the official Nuance Dragon for Mac website for any updates.

Beautiful Lion Tamer picture (without the MacSpeech Scribe box) oil painting by Jennifer Li, click here to see Jennifer’s amazing artwork.

Hot on the heels of the Windows update to NaturallySpeaking to 11.5 from 11 (released yesterday in Australia) us Mac users also receive a free bump to our favourite voice recognition software, assuming you are a registered Dragon Dictate 2.0 user.

Simply check for updates when you fire up Dragon Dictate and you will be presented with this:

In a press release yesterday Nuance announced and made available a free upgrade for all registered Dragon Dictate 2.0 customer via check for updates. New and of note to most will be the ability to use your iPhone as a wireless remote mic to feed directly into Dragon Dictate (must be connected on the same WiFi network).

You will need the free Dragon Remote Mic app from iTunes, this is the same app which also works as a remote mic into Nuance’s Windows voice recognition offering, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5.

So what is new in Dragon Dictate 2.5

• Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac support.
• Remote mic using your iPhone as just mentioned.
• Easier integration with social media, use voice commands to tweet and update your Facebook status.
• Search engine specific browse commands for Bing, Google and Yahoo
• As well as the usual, faster and more accurate claims.

Click here for a full run down of the new features from the Nuance website.