Transcription, the act of extracting text from a pre-recorded voice file, used to be a separate product but got added to Dragon Dictate as a built-in feature a few versions ago. Dragon Professional version 6 does an excellent job of turning spoken words into text. The software is accurate and reliable. It also provides a great way to control a Mac when you can’t or don’t want to use hands. The all-new Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, v6, a smarter next-generation speech recognition solution empowers busy professionals to complete documentation and reporting quickly and accurately on the Mac, so you spend more time on activities that boost the bottom line.

• Dragon For Mac V6 Review

But I’ve kept using it because I still prefer it over Siri dictation. And I’m severely disabled so I dictate ALOT. So I’m seriously considering jumping on this deal even though I hate the idea of giving them more money.

With a 1,000 word dictation, I normally have 5-10 corrections. Let's call it 99%. With version 6, I'm still getting excellent accuracy.

The whole thing now feels relatively stable and dictation into Word, Pages and even Google Docs seems a lot smoother (I haven’t yet had a chance to test it in Scrivener, however). It still seems to have the odd problem with the famous “wandering cursor” though, so I still recommend dictating into TextEdit just to be safe and cut-and-paste into your word processor of choice. While it’s undoubtedly good news for Mac users of Dragon, I have to wonder whether Nuance have done some irrepairable damage to their reputation.

But the correction in version 6 seems to be buggy still. Other Dragon Articles. Kudos to you for trying to help out for people that as you say, made the mistake of purchasing Dragon for Mac 6. The reality is that when I that you can sum up your post by saying that “the new version doesn’t work with anything that you might want it to, and on the rare occasions when it does work, that only happens under limited circumstances.” I can’t believe that I gave reached this point, however quality dictation is so important to my work that I am switching back to PC after many happy years with a Mac.

Slowness to Load Once Dragon for Mac is running, the speech recognition is fast, but the application itself is terribly slow to install and to load. When Dragon for Mac is launched there is a message “Dragon is Starting up’ and Dragon for Mac takes about 30 seconds to load. Most of my other apps take 1-2 seconds to launch.

Recognition is better with a microphone specifically designed for this usage, but in my testing I found that, in my quiet home/office, accuracy was excellent using the internal mic on my Retina iMac. The most visible change in Dragon 5 is the slimmed-down interface. Dragon is now a headless application, which you access by clicking a menu bar icon. It has a small status window which you can use to control the microphone, pick from multiple options when making corrections, and getting some information about what you can say.

User Interface While the underlying engine of Dragon Dictate for Mac has been on par with its PC counterpart for years, the Mac version's user interface has been playing catch up with the much more mature PC version. Nuance made big strides with version 6 with revamped status and correction windows that feel less well goofy. They also cleaned up the way the windows display commands and the preferences selection screen. These changes are a welcome face lift but they were also designed to reduce the number of clicks and scrolls required to get things done. Transcription Transcription, the act of extracting text from a pre-recorded voice file, used to be a separate product but got added to Dragon Dictate as a built-in feature a few versions ago. However, it always felt a bit like it was bolted on to Dragon Dictate. The new version fixes this.

It manages to cope with a few minutes of audio where there is only one speaker, but chokes if you attempt to transcribe, say, an interview with two people talking. A personal productivity note While the technology in Dragon’s latest voice recognition software is impressive, it’s not for me.

If you keep things extremely simple as outlined above, using Dragon as a draft tool as opposed to creating finalised documents, it will work really well. Hi, Andrea, I use Dragon Naturally Speaking for work.

Mobile Productivity Stay productive wherever you go. Continue creating and editing documents — even when work takes you away from the office. Sync with Dragon Anywhere, the separate, cloud-based mobile dictation solution, and create and edit documents of any length by voice directly on your iOS or Android device for seamless productivity.

'No', he said 'Its a known issue and needs a patch downloaded. It's been going on for a long time.' DUH, why allow customers to download a faulty product and then put them through the tedious and frustrating process of getting trough to tech support.

But the software debris left over from the Dragon Dictate 4 installation was more troublesome than I expected.

I had hoped that the new version would make it possible to avoid that. Most annoying of all is that this is a victory for Nuance as i will have to purchase yet another version of their software. I use Pages, and Dragon has never worked properly with it for the past several versions. Another problem I found is that I cannot dictate into some programs.

It is wonderful walking around and sometimes flailing my arms around completely untethered from any wires and having this high amount of accuracy. It is expensive at $150 but I would never want to go back to having to be connected by a cord and the accuracy is equally as good. Thanks, scott hall Like •.

• An Internet connection for product download and automatic product activation (a quick anonymous process) • Note: Does not support dictation into Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. For EMR support, please use Dragon Medical Practice Edition.

One thing you can do in Dragon 5 is correct a word by dictating a word to replace it. That works pretty well most of the time, assuming that Dragon knows the word already.

Some older devices are no longer supported. For more information, please visit support.nuance.com/compatibility.

I don’t dictate all of my work, far from it, but I take advantage of Dragon’s powers to change the way I work several times a week. Instead of leaning over my keyboard, I sit back, relax, and talk to my Mac. And my words appear on screen.

Parallels Desktop is software that allows you to run Windows software on your Mac, so you can have the best of both worlds if you wish. You can see it working here: Like. Hello Jenzhou, Hope it is going well. Version 6 I skipped the training on version 6 and just did the microphone setup. Surprisingly it has not missed a beat.

For example here are some pictures of the status window. As well as giving you a volume level it displays tips of what you can say. These tips are really useful, especially for new users to Dragon, although I’ve been using it for years and I still found them useful. The suggestions vary depending on the context – where your cursor is. The status window with the microphone off. Accuracy The speech recognition accuracy seems fairly similar to what it was in Dragon 4 (I was running Dragon 4 with the ‘accuracy’ set to maximum.) Dragon claim an accuracy improvement of 15%. That might be true but it’s hard to notice.

I consistently encounter the same set of functional errors, making it difficult to reliably make a correction. Corrections are supposed to work like this: You're dictating along and you get a word that takes the wrong form, is misspelled or wasn't the word you were looking for. To remedy the problem, you tell Dragon 'Correct that' or 'Correct xyz' (naming the incorrect word or phrase). Dragon pops up a numbered list of suggested corrections.

Buy a separate PC just for dictation? Go the Parallels route on their Mac? Or simply accept that the software isn’t as good but is at least finally stable?

In general, Dictate seems far more stable under Mojave. Bottom line: even though I installed Parallels Desktop in order to be able to run Dragon NaturallySpeaking 15, it turns out that Mojave makes Dragon Dictate much better. No, it’s still not as good as the PC version, but I would say it has reached the “generally very usable” level with the OS update.

Format hard drive for mac and pc. Western Digital external hard drives are useful for storing and backing up files. However, you may have run into a problem trying to use your Western Digital hard drive with multiple operating systems. This is because you must format the drive with a specific file system before using it with a. Format WD External Hard Drive On A Mac Step. Plug the cable attached to the WD external hard drive to the appropriate port on the Mac, for example, the USB port. To make your Western Digital hard drive work on both Mac and Windows computers, you need to format the drive with the FAT32 file system. Western Digital: How to Format a WD External Hard Drive.

I don’t really mind it, but it the Mac version has gotten good enough (in terms of accuracyand that it actually WORKS) then I would probably make the jump BACK to the Mac version. Any thoughts on this? Thanks you Scott.

OK, they replied after 5 days. First attempt was to delete the Dragon plist file, but it made no difference, crashes continued at a continuous pace. Then they asked me to completely remove D5 and then reinstall.

I imported my old speech profile across to Dragon for Mac and the amount of mistakes that are being made doesn’t seem to have changed significantly. I’m not coming away thinking ‘wow, this is a huge improvement in the speech recognition accuracy.’ I am coming away with a big wow in terms of the ability to dictate without any training – more about that later. Speed The lack of noticeable improvement in accuracy is more than made up for in the speed improvement. The speed at which the speed recognition is done is incredible! The text appears almost instantaneously the moment you stop speaking.

• Supported Operating System: OS X El Capitan (10.11) and Sierra/High Sierra. • A current Dragon Dictate Mac v4/5 is required to use this v6 upgrade. • This is a Download Only only. No DVD will be shipped. • DO NOT ORDER THIS UPGRADE if you have Dragon Dictate Medical • FOR APPLE MAC ONLY With a next-generation speech engine leveraging Deep Learning technology, Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, v6 is more accurate than ever and adapts to your voice or environmental variations even while you’re dictating.

Dragon listens to the words you speak, but also looks at the context in which words are used. The more familiar it becomes with your specific vocabulary, and the way you order words, the more accurate it is. You can also use Dragon to transcribe recordings, a feature that I described in. You can use voice commands to control your Mac, and Dragon 5 supports more accents, such as Canadian, Southeast Asian, Indian, and Australian English. Full Text Control lets you talk and type, and issue commands, in Microsoft Word 2001 and 2016, as well as TextEdit. (You can talk and type in any application, as long as you issue the “Cache document” command each time you make changes from the keyboard.) With “Menu walking,” you can tell Dragon to click menus, controlling any application. Say any commands in any menus, such as “Click Window Menu; Click Minimize,” for example, and Dragon executes them hands-free.

Dragon for Mac was never very happy when you combined dictating in the same document, except with just a couple of apps. In the past, if you dictated a couple of sentences, then typed or pasted something, Dragon lost track of the text and the position of the cursor in the document, making it harder to edit text. You can get over this by saying “cache document” every time you made a change; Dragon quickly reads through the entire document to know where all the words are. In the new version, Dragon takes advantage of Apple’s accessibility framework to insert text into documents more quickly, and to keep track of what words are in a document, and where. With version 5, every time you paused after saying something, you would see the text appear on the screen one letter, one word at a time, very quickly. But now, with apps that correctly use the accessibility framework, Dragon actually pastes the text, the entire utterance in one go. This makes dictation much faster, as long as you’re using an application that supports this, such as TextEdit, the most recent versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, Scrivener, Messages, Microsoft Word, Outlook, and others.

If you’re committed to using Dragon, then investing some time makes sense. Yet in practice the software works so well out of the box you might decide to just get on with it. It seems the software does some form of training when in use.

Until Dragon for Mac has something like that, we'll struggle along with this problem. Unfortunately, in version 5 the situation is worse rather than better. I encountered a good example of a no-win situation when I dictated 'I liked that version too.' Dragon interpreted that as 'I liked that version 2.' When I tried to correct the '2,' the program bounced up into the document and found a nearby 'to.' When I tried to correct by saying, 'Numeral 2,' it bounced up several paragraphs, finding a '2' there.

Dragon for Mac 5 was introduced in a Nuance webcast on August 18. The company introduced several new products targeting Windows and Mac users, mobile users and enterprises. Plus there's a new central administration tool called Nuance User Management Center that manages licensing and shared customizations. The company has an interesting way of naming its products these days. Besides moving from what was called Dragon Dictate to the more logical Dragon for Mac ($200), the new version of Dragon that you might have expected to be called Dragon NaturallySpeaking 14 for Windows is now called Dragon Professional Individual ($300). (There are also lower-cost, less-powerful versions for home use.) The enterprise product is called Dragon Professional Group. The company also announced a new cloud/mobile product called Dragon Anywhere, which is due to be released in the near future.

UK voice recognition settings don’t work for me. Nor do New Zealand ones. Oddly, Australian settings get me the best result on Apple equipment.

6 was and returned v. 6.0.0 You described that 6.0.6 is usuable–my biggest issue was randomly jumping cursor and trying to edit. Have they had any other updates since your article to make it even better? Jumping cursor was dealbreaker as it made it impossible to use. Even jumped in wordpad. Thanks for your reply.

Keep in mind both Apple and Microsoft include voice recognition software as part of their operating systems. Neither application is free, but they are already paid for. So, in effect, Dragon is, asking people to pay again for something they already have. That puts the business’s livelihood on the line. To make it work, Dragon has to offer something special. It does that. Dragon Professional version 6 performs far better than the alternatives from Apple and Microsoft.

Hi Scott, I originally got the Mac version 6 last summer when it came out. Had never used dictation software before.

Record voice memos to transcribe later. Transform podcasts or the voice of a single speaker into written words. Dragon works the way you work.

This I learned after being asked to enter my order number (plowed through many many emails to find it) and my password (apparently not the same password associated with my Nuance account) resetting the password three times only to find the new password would not log me onto the location to retrieve my program. My other option was to enter my email and the last 5 digits of the credit card used to purchase the program, a year ago -who remembers which card they used a year later? Went through many rounds of attempting to use the Nuance support web site but again, ended up on a page where I had to reset the password for my account, which when successfully logged on gave me only registered product serial numbers, not order numbers or the access to a re-download. Incidentally, the new password linking me to serial numbers would not work when entered with the order number.

With Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, you can transcribe voice recordings from a smartphone or portable voice recorder, podcasts or audio files of any single speaker’s voice to text quickly, easily and accurately. Streamlined setup makes transcription faster and easier than ever. • Transcribe from.mp3 aif,.aiff,.wav,.mp4,.m4a,.m4v. • Complete transcription quickly and accurately with no voice training required even for third-party speakers • Transcribe any single speaker’s voice from pre-recorded audio files or from podcasts • Use transcription Batch Mode and save time if you have multiple audio files to transcribe.

Word for mac print dialog box won't open site:discussions.apple.com. If you’ve never used this software before, this is a great time to check it out. The fact that you can get excellent results without buying a specific microphone makes it more affordable, and easier to use.

It uses something called deep learning to improve accuracy. Dragon Professional more accurate than alternatives Dragon claims this means the software has 99 percent recognition accuracy.

Dragon For Mac V6 Review

I'm happy with it. I often record with background noise and it only occasionally makes mistakes. I used to transcribe my notes manually, and this has saved me tremendous time. The problem is that I can only load and transcribe one file at a time. If I try to load multiple files, it crashes every time.

I assume these will be sorted out fairly soon. Dragon for Mac: final thoughts This is the most significant upgrade to Dragon since. I said that I did not think it was worth the upgrade from 3 to 4.

Does it now work easily – and without crashing? I am astounded Nuance still has not implemented a porting of DNS into Mac OSX after all these years. They appear be continuing their long-standing commitment to the current iterations of the Mac Dictate app, which has never been the equal of DNS on the PC.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve given Nuance any more of my money. I’m still on version 5.05, which works well enough although some things, like making corrections by voice, don’t work well anymore.

Unfortunately that wasn't the case. In a moment, I'll circle back to that story and what I finally did to get Dragon for Mac 5 installed properly and running well. In fact, I've come to admire this version of the program. While there is plenty to pick at, overall Dragon for Mac 5 is a very worthwhile upgrade. It would also be a great place to get started on dictation if you've been waiting in the wings.

Even getting the thing to launch could be a challenge – keeping it stable long enough to deliver any form of accurate recognition was even more problematic. A familiar sight for Mac users of Dragon Professional Individual 6.

The Status Window won't let you scroll the suggestions so you can see the ones that aren't visible or allow you to drag the edges or corners of the Status Window to make it taller or wider. Adding the ability to manually expand the box would be a useful fallback option.

It was a disaster. Although professional scribes are taught to ‘write like you talk’, that advice is not meant to be taken literally. When I gave up on voice recognition, I hit the ground running and finished the post in minutes. There’s another problem that may affect some readers. I feel self-conscious and uncomfortable when dictating to a machine. There’s nothing worse than knowing people can hear you as you compose a story. That’s not an issue when I type.

Their support forums haven’t even been accessible for quite some time for whatever reason which is why I’m here instead. In fact I’m grateful that this thread exists. So now that it’s been updated a bunch does anybody feel that it’s worth it at that price?