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
Dragon Dictate has been available in Australia and worldwide for a couple of weeks now and the flood of people upgrading from MacSpeech Dictate shows just how keen Mac users are for good voice recognition software like Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows. This short post is just a way for me to show you the very basics and the main reason why people buy this software. Simply, speech recognition lets you talk to your Mac and have it transcribe what you say. If you are a slow typist, your hands hurt when you type alot or you think faster than you type then this is the software for you. Take a look:
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.
The cat is finally out of the bag as Nuance, owners of the MacSpeech brand of voice recognition for Intel Mac, announced the latest version of the Dictate family. Dragon Dictate, formerly known as MacSpeech Dictate, is the new name and with it comes more enhancements and features. In this blog post we will look at:
What’s New In Dragon Dictate 2.0 for Mac
What Are Your Upgrade Options From MacSpeech Dictate to Dragon Dictate
Where Can You Buy The Software In Australia
Dictate Australia has been with MacSpeech Dictate since day one, we are big fans and have loved to see this product grow from strength to strength. Now at version 2.0 the influence of Nuance is clear for all to see as the product lines of their famous NaturallySpeaking brand for Windows and Dictate for Mac merge closer and closer together. We have been beta testing the new Dragon Dictate for a few weeks and love the new look and feel, it feels polished.
I have always been honest and up-front with any customer I have spoken to over the years when asked “…just how good is MacSpeech Dictate?”. I have lauded the accuracy of the Dragon speech recognition engine on the Mac but you could always feel that there was alot of catching up to do with the feature packed and more mature Windows equivalent. Nuance, since their takeover of MacSpeech earlier this year, are acknowledging the importance of the Mac by showing their dedication and support to the Dictate product and with Dragon Dictate 2.0 we now have a world class speech recognition software for the Apple Mac.
Proof Reading Added – making full use of the Macs text-to-speech functionality Dragon Dictate will now read back to you your transcripts, helping speed up the proof reading process.
Mouse Grid – My favourite, makes browsing the web easy by zooming into a point on the screen quickly using a mouse grid.
Mouse Movement – Easily fly your mouse pointer around the screen using just your voice.
Mouse Click – Again, using your voice you can click, double click and triple click.
Multiple Audio Sources – Use more than one mic? No longer a problem you can have multiple audio source now for your trained profile.
Easier Editing – A range of new commands to help edit documents by voice much easier.
Dragon Dictate is available to buy now from the MacSpeech Australia website and available in four configurations:
** boxed products available October 2010 in Australia, pre orders being taken now.
There is also good news if you currently own MacSpeech Dictate. Dragon Dictate is available as an upgrade from any version of MacSpeech Dictate. Here are the upgrade options in Australia:
Upgrade to Dragon Dictate for Mac if you have MacSpeech Dictate v1.5 and upwards
You have two upgrade options (your v1.5+ software must be registered before you upgrade):
You can upgrade the software only via download (be prepared its a big download, between 1Gb – 2Gb) for only AU$69. If you prefer the boxed upgrade that will be available in October. Click here for the Dragon Dictate Australia upgrade site.
You can upgrade the software and pickup a new Plantronics Calisto bluetooth headset for wireless dictation for AU$179. This will be a boxed product and available from October onwards. Pre orders are being taken now. Click here for the Dragon Dictate Australia upgrade site.
Your existing MacSpeech Dictate v1.5 profile(s) can also be upgraded, make sure you back them up first before you upgrade.
Upgrade to Dragon Dictate for Mac if you have MacSpeech Dictate v1.0 to v1.3
You will need to email MacSpeech Sales with your serial number and current version and they will give you upgrade instructions.
We are not ones for blowing our own trumpet but this week we are feeling well and truly chuffed with ourselves. Dictate Australia have just become certified Gold Dragon NaturallySpeaking resellers, this gives us bragging rights to call ourselves experts in the leading speech recognition software for the Windows world. Having studied and passed our exams we can proudly display the Nuance Gold Certified reseller logo on our website, blog, e-mail signature and on our T-shirts, in fact I may even get it tattooed on my arm! You can throw at us any Dragon NaturallySpeaking question and we will be able to answer it (and if we can’t, we have the contacts in Nuance Australia who can).
So why do we also call ourselves experts in Mac voice recognition. Well, we have been supporters of MacSpeech Dictate since version 1.0 first appeared a couple of years ago. We have seen this product grow since version 1.0 into the advanced voice recognition product for Mac that it is nowadays. We are also beta testers for MacSpeech, so we are always up to date with what’s new and what is coming in the next version. This is very exciting for us and sometimes a little hard to keep quiet on some of the new features and functions as we see them during testing.
We often hear from people in the Dictate Australia office who say “yes but is voice recognition any good nowadays?”, this commonly comes from people who tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking in the version 6, 7 or 8 days. We too tried voice recognition in the early days and found it hard going. The reason we moved back into voice recognition software was because of MacSpeech Dictate, we could see the advances that have been made and we wanted to give it another try. Now that MacSpeech is owned by Nuance an already excellent product can only get better, and will get better very quickly.
This blog post has been written using MacSpeech Dictate.
One of the three words being used to describe the new Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 from Nuance is Smarter. By Smarter I take it to mean that the voice recognition engine can not only learn from its mistakes (DNS11 will now learn from corrections you make) but also be contextually aware. By contextually aware I mean smart enough to know the difference between to and two, or their and there and they’re, the types of basic grammar we take for granted having all been through years of schooling and listening intently in English class. I don’t recall sitting next to a Dragon speech recognition engine in class so the software really is geting smarter. In this very brief video demo from the US arm of Nuance we hear someone dictate a short sentence with plenty of contextual curve balls, as you will see the context is handled perfectly by Dragon Naturally Speaking 11.
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