Dragon Dictate review: speech recognition from Nuance for Mac
I’m using version 2.5.2 of Dragon Dictate for Mac with a Plantronics noise cancelling headset I bought from ebay.
My MacBook Pro is new as of June 2011, has 8gb of RAM and a 512gig solid state drive. It has a 2.3Ghz i7 processor. So it’s very fast.
Dragon Dictate’s speech recognition is excellent. Really excellent.
However… there are many silly inconsistencies in the software which make Dragon Dictate a real nuisance to use at times.
Here are 41 ‘weirdnesses’ I’ve come across recently…
1. I’m a Brit. If I say “I now weigh 120 pounds” Dragon types out “I weigh £120″.
2. If I say: “I am not the first person to point out this bug in Scribe”, Dragon types ’1st person’ with no option to choose ‘first person’. Equally it types “I have a 6th sense about things” whereas I’d like the fourth word to be “sixth”.
3. I said the word ‘reader’. The cursor went back to the first word of the document and a spoken voice said ‘are’! This happened twice!
4. If I say a phrase, then say ‘new line’, whether the first word of the next thing I say appears in caps or not seems inconsistent. I find this to be distracting.
5. Whether the first letter after a colon is a capital letter or not seems also inconsistent.
6. Sometimes, after a dash, the first letter is capitalised for no reason. “This is great–Ultimately…” Yuck!
I dictated the exact same sentence again later and this time the word “ultimately” was lower case. Why is the transcription different???
7. When I say “I’m using Dragon Dictate for Mac” Dragon types, sometimes “I’m using DragonDictate for Mac” – with “DragonDictate” as one word being the primary option and “Dragon Dictate” as the second option. Why do that? Why not stick with “Dragon Dictate” as 2 words as it’s written on Nuance’s site?
8. If I say “Dragon Dictate can be inconsistent DASH which is a nuisance”, Dragon types “Dragon Dictate can be inconsistent–which is a nuisance”. This may look fine in America, but in the UK we always put a space before and after the dash. Always. So we expect the following: “Dragon Dictate can be inconsistent – which is a nuisance”
9. If I say: “It’s one fifty three pee emm” Dragon types “1:53 PM” I would love to be able to get “1:53pm” – which is what we’re used to seeing in the UK.
10. If I say: “This will take you 5 minutes.” Dragon types: “This will take you 5 min.”
11. While I was dictating, my son Felix blew a raspberry into the mike, and Dragon launched an app called Yep!
12. I dictated the following as text: “Open the pod bay doors” – and Dragon Dictate launched an app called Clipstart!
13. I said “delete hardy” (a word DD transcribed) and Dragon recognised that as Read High, and spoke the word ‘High’
14. I said “new paragraph find the book”. DD typed “findable”, I said “scratch that, choose 2″, and DD typed “find the book”. The ‘f’ should be in upper case after a ‘new paragraph’ instruction, but it’s not. If I say “new paragraph fiver”, again ‘fiver’ is in lower case.
15: If I say “Caps on journey outside” DD types “Journey outside”. Why is ‘o’ of outside in lower case!
16: I said the word “buy” and DD offered only one choice: “by” . It didn’t offer the spelling “buy”.
17: I said “Get other people to list theirs”. DD offered the word “there’s” but didn’t suggest “theirs”
18: I said “four half cups” and DD typed ”4 /2 cups” instead of ”4 1/2 cups” or “4 half cups”
19: If I say 8% and say delete 8% it deletes the 8 and changes % to percent!
20: I said the word ‘us’ after stonewall and Dragon went up 2 lines and bolded the word ‘is’!
21: If I say “New line”, the cursor goes to the next line, but if you say “bullet”, the bullet appears at the end of the previous line!!Even if I say “new paragraph”, the bullet STILL appears at the beginning of the previous line!!
22: I dictated “You can write a long ad” (by ‘ad’ I meant advert) — and Dragon typed “You can write a long” — the word ad didn’t appear!!
23: If I say “and include upper case holy cow”, Dragon types “AND INCLUDE holy cow”. Bizarre. (I know I should have said “and include caps on holy cow” — I wasn’t thinking straight!)
24: I said “Have 120 to” and Dragon typed “120 122″!!
25: I said “Buckminster Fuller” (the man who invented the geodesic domes (as seen at Disney’s Epcot). Dragon typed “book minster Fuller” with no option of “Buckminster Fuller”. A day later and Dragon got the guy’s name right! So Dragon seems to me to be inconsistent at times.
26: I said “look” [pause] “up” and Dragon launched an application called Yep.
27: I said “settee” (a popular word in the UK for a couch) — and Dragon only offered the word “city” as an option.
28: I said “caps on more than a carpenter” and Dragon typed “More Than a Carpenter”. I wanted the ‘a’ to be capitalised.
29: I said “caps on journey outside” and Dragon typed “Journey outside”. I expected the ‘o’ to be capitalised.
30: I said “caps on essential adverts to get your message across” and Dragon typed “Essential Adverts to Get Your Message across”. I want the ‘a’ in ‘across’ to be capitalised.
31: I said “appendix a” and Dragon typed “Appendix a”. It offered 2 choices: (1) Appendix a and (2) appendix A. I said Choose 2, but it still displayed “Appendix a”. Why didn’t it put a capitalised A in my text??? However when I said “appendix B” Dragon got that right.
32: I said “and strengthen the book’s focus” and Dragon typed “and strengthen the book’s focus”. There was no suggestion with “book’s” with an apostrophe.
33: I said “reveal that” and Dragon typed “reveal that *” — i.e. it put an asterisk next to the word ‘that’! Weird!
34: I said “possesses a knack” — and Dragon didn’t type anything. I said ”possesses a knack” again, and Dragon still didn’t respond! The internal fan came on and when I said “has a knack” it took several seconds for that text to appear.
35: I lifted up my arms and stretched and Dragon launched Yep. Dragon does seem to like Yep!
36: I said “swot analysis” and Dragon typed “swot analysis”. I think Dragon should know this phrase and offer “SWOT analysis” as an option.
37: I said “re-think” and Dragon interpreted that as a command: Read think — so my Mac said the word think out loud.
38: I said “dot org” and Dragon typed “.or”. I said “org” and got “all”.
39: Dragon doesn’t the word “intuitives” in its dictionary. It would be FABULOUS if there was a way to send words to the Nuance team to update the dictionary for everyone so Dragon Dictate got smarter!
40: I said “I read the book called steve jobs by walter isaacson” and Dragon typed “”I read the book called Steve jobs by Walter Isaacson” — i.e. ‘j’ was lower case instead of upper case. I think Dragon Dictate should have “Steve Jobs” as a phrase in its dictionary by now!! 
41: I said “what site or book” and Dragon typed “What site to pull”. I said “delete pull” [pause] “delete to”. Dragon moved the cursor back 2 paragraphs, one character space at a time — which took about 10 seconds — until it found another ‘to’ earlier in the text and deleted that!
What all this means…
When I use Dragon Dictate, it does one the silly things above every 5-10 minutes – and I find this VERY distracting. It gets in the way of my dictation. Dragon Dictate simply isn’t polished enough using its own Notepad.
I tried dictating in Pages, but it’s disconcertingly slower than in Notepad. I abandoned that option.
Here’s a video I created to show Dragon Dictate in action in its Notepad mode so you can see how fast/slow it is at transcribing my dictation…
I have reported a few problems with Dragon Dictate to the customer support team at Nuance, and I wasn’t happy with the replies I got back: maybe they are very busy, but they didn’t get to the root of my issues.
I read a post by a very knowledgable guy on the Nuance forums who is a US-based speech recognition consultant. I tracked down his email address using Google, and dropped him a line. He kindly responded, and confirmed that Nuance’s customer support has been, and continues to be, poor in his experience.
I wrote this on the Quora website…
“I think the reason bugs/issues like this exist is that Nuance’s tech support team don’t seem operate in the way other companies do. They don’t seem to check their forum. They don’t reply consistently to emailed issues. And I’m guessing that as a consequence customers aren’t emailing them with the problems they are having. And maybe tech support aren’t relaying problem issues to the programmers.”
…but I could be very wrong!
Using a digital recorder
I dictate a lot of audio on a digital recorder. Dragon Dictate will only handle transcribing live dictation. You need MacSpeech Scribe from Nuance to handle audio files, and you can only get Scribe to process one file at a time. The PC version, Dragon Naturally Speaking, handles audio files as well as live dictation. And you can ask it to transcribe a batch of audio files.
You will find a good review of Dragon Dictate here where the reviewer, Steven Foskett, expresses his utter frustration with it.
Erica Hill from Nuance replied to him, and Steven commented on her response on this page of his site. Maybe by the spring or summer of 2012 Dragon Dictate will be a better product. We’ll see!
(You’ll find my review of MacSpeech Scribe here.)
Summary
What’s good…
- Really really excellent recognition: I am often delighted when Dragon again and again accurately types exactly what I say!
What’s not so good…
- Inconsistency in transcription (for example, sometimes the software types Dragon Dictate and sometime DragonDictate)
- Weird transcriptions (“1st” instead of “first”, “I weigh £20″ instead of “I weigh 20 pounds”, etc)
- Customer service isn’t great (questions on forum ignored, issues like the inconsistency in transcription ignored or skated around (“it’s your headset”) when emails sent to the team)
What I recommend…
From comments I have come across on the web, Dragon Naturally Speaking for PC is a much more polished program.
Here’s my recommendation to you…
If you are serious about using speech recognition on the Mac, and you want to process multiple audio files in one go, you may want to consider the following…
- Buying Dragon Dictate and MacSpeech Scribe together will cost more than the PC version.
- Dragon Naturally Speaking for PC is a more mature product.
- MacSpeech Scribe is very buggy and, for me, not fit for purpose.
- Look at setting up Parallels on your Mac, or use Bootcamp and install Windows.
- Buy Dragon Naturally Speaking for PC and use that.
This is what I’m seriously considering!
Chris Payne helps people triumph over the challenges in their lives: one-on-one, by phone, and via video calls. He also creates websites like this one for people, and teaches them how to earn a part- or full-time income from their website. See this page for more about him.
