Nuance has quickly forged their authority on the Dictate brand of voice recognition software for Mac and with their first release Dragon Dictate 2.0 they have done an excellent job. But what now for the Legal and Medical edition still stuck at MacSpeech Dictate version 1.5 and the fairly new offshoot product MacSpeech Scribe currently at version 1.1, all of which are using the older Dragon speech recognition engine and not the new one included with Dragon Dictate.

I have some theories for these products which may or may not be correct so please don’t hold me to them. These are my best guesses and have not been confirmed or denied by Nuance, just my two cents worth.

MacSpeech Scribe in my view can go in ne of two directions. It can either be discontinued and the voice to text functionality built into a later Dragon Dictate update, much like Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium or Professional for Windows. Or Nuance will embrace this as a separate product and continue to push it as a stand alone offering for transcribing only recorded audio. I have always been torn on MacSpeech Scribe, I have never understood why you would create a separate product for transcription of digitally recorded audio but that maybe because I have been so used to the functionality from the Windows side of the fence. As MacSpeech Scribe is still fairly new I have a feeling Nuance will continue with it and we will likely see a Dragon Scribe product appear in the very near future.

So what about the Medical and Legal version of MacSpeech Dictate, are we going to see an equivalent in Dragon Dictate? My personal view is that we are likely to see a Legal version for Dragon Dictate but maybe not the Medical version. From my understanding the Legal dictionary of terms is fairly standard and so can be quite easily built into a speech recognition dictionary. Wheres Medical with its large number of specialised area of understanding would be an unwieldily dictionary to maintain and build. For the Medical side of things I think we will see a third party put their hand up and claim an exclusive partnership with Nuance to provide and support that medical crowd.

So when can we see what I have theorised about above. Dragon Scribe I would think would be very close, if it is coming, and we would likely see this before the end of the year. Dragon Dictate Legal I would also see on the same time line, especially as we now have Dragon Dictate in the wild adding a more comprehensive legal dictionary can’t be that far behind.

Of course as soon as we get wind of any new voice recognition products from Nuance for the Mac or Windows we will post the info.

MacSpeech Dictate Legal Version Announced

Just a week or so since the launch of MacSpeech Dictate Medical, the legal version comes packed with a dictionary full of legal jargon, 30,000 legal words and terms, the kind of chit chat lawyers use every day and the kind of words their typists struggle with, unless of course they outsource their legal transcription to our sister company The Transcription People (shameless plug, sorry).

MacSpeech Dictate Legal is built on the very latest Dragon speech recognition software from the people at Nuance, in fact from what I understand the recognition engine in MacSpeech Dictate version 1.5 is more advanced than that currently in use by the Windows folk running Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10.1, so state of the art voice recognition combined with a comprehensive legal dictionary.

As always, no news yet of Australian packages or pricing as the US announcement is just a few hours old. However, in the US the price of MacSpeech Dictate Legal is the same as MacSpeech Dictate Medical so it would be fair to assume the same packages and same pricing as Medical (Australian MacSpeech Dictate Medical pricing and packages). As soon as we receive confirmation from the Australian distributor on price and availability I will post.