iDictate – Digital Voice Blog

And a pleasant surprise today when this popped up on my desktop:

Yes, 11.5 is now ready for download and upgrade in Australia for all registered Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 users. The upgrade will open up the use of your iPhone as a remote wireless mic into Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Windows (unless you are a Home user) aswell as some new social tools like tweeting and Facebook updates using Dragon. I am willing to bet 20c that we will see another upgrade soon to include posts to Google+, here’s hoping.

Want to know how to use your iPhone with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5? First you will need to grab the free Dragon Remote Mic app from iTunes here Then watch this official Nuance video … [click here for the video]

##UPDATE TO ORIGINAL POST##

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion was released worldwide on 20th July, 2011

I have personally upgraded from 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to 10.7 (Lion) 

with Dragon Dictate 2.0.3 installed with no issues.

CLICK HERE for the official status of Mac Dragon products with Lion

Note it says: 

Dragon Dictate 2.5 Customers

Dragon Dictate 2.5 customers may experience irregular software crashes 

when opening or running the software on the new Apple OS X Lion. We are 

currently investigating reports to discover and address the root cause 

of the issue. If you wish to continue using Dragon Dictate most 

effectively, we encourage you to maintain Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

With the launch of OS X version 10.7 better known as Lion about to hit the Apple Mac App Store on 20th July in the US (likely the 21st July in Australia) now the frantic search is on to see what products we already have installed on Snow Leopard (10.6) that will still work when we upgrade. For me and many others the question is shifting to the best voice recognition software for the Mac – Dragon Dictate from Nuance.

So can I upgrade to Lion and still use Dragon Dictate? YES, BUT MAYBE WAIT A LITTLE based on the following:

I have emailed my Australian Nuance contact and was told that there are no incompatibilities that they are aware of. This is a good sign but I am still looking for someone who has managed to install the dev release of Lion and test with Dragon Dictate.

I have emailed the US Nuance Dragon Dictate beta testing co-ordinator and am awaiting a reply.

I have messaged Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Facebook (yes they look after the Mac product also) and was told this:

I have looked on the Nuance Dragon for Mac forum – click here

I have tweeted @DragonTweets and was just given a link to the curent Dragon Dictate specs webpage which showed compatible with Snow Leopard, not the answer I was after people !

I have checked the Mac OS X Lion Application Compatibility chart listed at roaringapps.com and it says “App Has Not Been Tested”

We get alot of hits on our blog from all over the world. Many hits are people searching for answers to specific questions. So we thought we would start a post and update as we go with questions we see pop up from day to day. This post will get longer over time so make good use of your browsers search function (here’s a tip, click Ctrl-f):

Do you have a question you would like answered? Leave a comment and we may include it in the list.

More

Some excitement over the last couple of weeks with rumours abound that Nuance have done a deal with Apple and have signed some kind of agreement to use their voice recognition technology in the up coming iOS5 release for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Since Siri was gobbled up by Apple back in 2010 we have all been waiting to see what Apple will do with the voice controlled concierge and the theory is Dragon will be used to power the new Apple stamped version of Siri when it finally emerges. These are just rumours for now but rumours which are growing in substance.

More

Nuance Australia this week released the Legal vocabulary pack for Australian Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 Professional users. The language pack is available as an add-on, you must have Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 Professional already installed, or you can buy the language pack with DNS 11 Pro as a bundle.

The legal pack is designed specifically for Australian legal users and is crammed full of Australian centric legal terms, just over 200 million words Nuance claim which will help legal users achieve optimal accuracy out of the box when dictating legal terms. More

I have a friend who is new to the iPhone, the other day he asked me if I knew of a good app that would convert speech to text on his iPhone so that he could speak an SMS message instead of typing it. He had been looking on the Australian iTunes store and didn’t find anything that grabbed him, I pulled my iPhone and demonstrated flawlessly the power of Dragon and the Nuance Dictation app.

Of course he was impressed, my speech was instantly transcribed and the resulting text ready to be sent as a text message. As we are all a social bunch the text transcribed is not just restricted to being sent in a text message. You can also email, tweet or Facebook text aswell as copy to a clipboard ready to paste into any other application on your touch device. So what is this magic and how does it work. More

Now that MacSpeech has been consumed by Nuance and their award winning Mac voice recognition software has been transformed into a world class offering, with it comes volume licensing making the software more attractive and available to commercial, government and more importantly academic institutions here in Australia.

If you are looking for a minimum of 5 licences (and a maximum of 2000+) then there is a volume licence package for you. Nuance, most famous for their Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition on Windows, are no stranger to volume licensing and have offered it for some years. They are now throwing this weight behind Dragon Dictate for Mac. More

We seem to be blessed here in Australia, we have an excellent distributor for Nuance’s Dragon Dictate who has been into voice recognition on the Mac since day 1. Because of this we have five combinations of Dragon Dictate and microphone to choose from. The bundles and their RRP pricing are: More