Customer Stories
Dragon NaturallySpeaking User Documentation Dragon's technical experts and documentation team have created guides, workbooks and videos to help you use Dragon more effectively. Please also see the KnowledgeBase where a wide range of users exchange tips and discuss feature requests. Compare Dragon Speech Recognition alternatives for your business or organization using the curated list below. SourceForge ranks the best alternatives to Dragon Speech Recognition in 2021. Compare features, ratings, user reviews, pricing, and more from Dragon Speech Recognition competitors and alternatives in order to make an informed decision. Each user profile associated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking stores a list of dictation sources - such as microphones and headsets - which learn the subtleties of your voice as you use the software. Each of your co-workers must use a Bluetooth headset with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 for some time to acclimate the software to his speech and the. For previous consumer editions of Dragon speech recognition, like Home and Premium Editions, Nuance grants one license of the software. This means Dragon can be installed on one computer located at one physical address. Installation on a secondary computer for back-up purposes is also permitted. However, the license is per user, not per machine.
DictatingE-mailandCalendarcommands 124 CommandsforMicrosoftOutlookExpress,WindowsMail,andWindowsLiveMail 127 MicrosoftOutlook 129 WorkingwithMicrosoftOutlook 129.
- Soaring Through High School
High school student Matthew Talley counts on MacSpeech Dictate to take him to new heights of expression and creativity. - Serving Up a Fresh Voice
For author and cooking sensation Jaden Hair, MacSpeech Dictate is one secret to success in creating her 'Steamy Kitchen' cookbook and blog. MacSpeech Dictate has helped journalist Bryce Hubner in covering the 2010 Winter Olympics, NCAA Championships and other sporting events.
Amazing Accuracy
MacSpeech Dictate will astonish you with its accuracy. You simply talk and leave the recognition to MacSpeech Dictate. MacSpeech Dictate recognizes and understands 13 English language variations, nine with U.S. spelling and four with U.K. spelling.
Minimal Training Required
MacSpeech Dictate provides astounding accuracy and productivity. With just minutes of training, you'll be using MacSpeech Dictate's superior capabilities.
Essential Command Capabilities
Instead of using your mouse to select menu commands or your keyboard to type shortcuts, just speak a command. MacSpeech Dictate executes it for you. What's more, MacSpeech Dictate understands key commands. With the 'Press The Key' and 'Press The Key Combo' commands, you can enter specific keys and even keyboard modifiers like Command, Option, Shift, and Control. That makes you more productive and MacSpeech Dictate more intuitive. What could be better?
Document Freedom
MacSpeech Dictate works great with most text documents, even those it didn't create. MacSpeech Dictate can read a document's contents, or a portion of it, that you can then navigate and edit.
Works With The Apps You Already Have
Brightness does not stay manual mac. Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and more. And MacSpeech Dictate works great with Apple's applications as well, including iChat, Mail, iPhoto, and Keynote, among others.
Spelling A World Of Words
MacSpeech Dictate's spelling mode lets you easily spell words, names, and acronyms with either natural language or the International Radio Alphabet. You have complete control over every aspect of your speech recognition input.
Make Your Move
You don't need a keyboard or mouse to move around in your documents. MacSpeech Dictate lets you move your cursor forwards, backwards, and much more with just your voice. It helps make editing your documents a breeze.
No Hidden Costs
MacSpeech Dictate includes everything you need to be instantly productive as soon as you start using it, including a high quality headset microphone.
Built Especially For The Mac
Mac users expect only the best from the applications they use on their Macs. MacSpeech Dictate was built from the ground up to ensure the ultimate experience on Mac OS X.
Exceptional Online Help
For those times when you need a little assistance, MacSpeech Dictate boasts a complete online, searchable help book. It's convenient to use, easy to understand, and all just a mouse click away.
MacSpeech Dictate provides a whole new way to interact with your Mac. Instead of typing, use your voice to input text; rather than clicking your mouse, just speak commands. With MacSpeech Dictate, it's easy.
In October 2018, Nuance announced that it has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac and will support it for only 90 days from activation in the US or 180 days in the rest of the world. The continuous speech-to-text software was widely considered to be the gold standard for speech recognition, and Nuance continues to develop and sell the Windows versions of Dragon Home, Dragon Professional Individual, and various profession-specific solutions.
This move is a blow to professional users—such as doctors, lawyers, and law enforcement—who depended on Dragon for dictating to their Macs, but the community most significantly affected are those who can control their Macs only with their voices.
What about Apple's built-in accessibility solutions? macOS does support voice dictation, although my experience is that it's not even as good as dictation in iOS, much less Dragon Professional Individual. Some level of voice control of the Mac is also available via Dictation Commands, but again, it's not as powerful as what was available from Dragon Professional Individual.
TidBITS reader Todd Scheresky is a software engineer who relies on Dragon Professional Individual for his work because he's a quadriplegic and has no use of his arms. He has suggested several ways that Apple needs to improve macOS speech recognition to make it a viable alternative to Dragon Professional Individual:
Every day MacSpeech Dictate helps thousands of Mac users. Here are some of our customers' stories:
DictatingE-mailandCalendarcommands 124 CommandsforMicrosoftOutlookExpress,WindowsMail,andWindowsLiveMail 127 MicrosoftOutlook 129 WorkingwithMicrosoftOutlook 129.
- Soaring Through High School
High school student Matthew Talley counts on MacSpeech Dictate to take him to new heights of expression and creativity. - Serving Up a Fresh Voice
For author and cooking sensation Jaden Hair, MacSpeech Dictate is one secret to success in creating her 'Steamy Kitchen' cookbook and blog. MacSpeech Dictate has helped journalist Bryce Hubner in covering the 2010 Winter Olympics, NCAA Championships and other sporting events.
Amazing Accuracy
MacSpeech Dictate will astonish you with its accuracy. You simply talk and leave the recognition to MacSpeech Dictate. MacSpeech Dictate recognizes and understands 13 English language variations, nine with U.S. spelling and four with U.K. spelling.
Minimal Training Required
MacSpeech Dictate provides astounding accuracy and productivity. With just minutes of training, you'll be using MacSpeech Dictate's superior capabilities.
Essential Command Capabilities
Instead of using your mouse to select menu commands or your keyboard to type shortcuts, just speak a command. MacSpeech Dictate executes it for you. What's more, MacSpeech Dictate understands key commands. With the 'Press The Key' and 'Press The Key Combo' commands, you can enter specific keys and even keyboard modifiers like Command, Option, Shift, and Control. That makes you more productive and MacSpeech Dictate more intuitive. What could be better?
Document Freedom
MacSpeech Dictate works great with most text documents, even those it didn't create. MacSpeech Dictate can read a document's contents, or a portion of it, that you can then navigate and edit.
Works With The Apps You Already Have
Brightness does not stay manual mac. Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and more. And MacSpeech Dictate works great with Apple's applications as well, including iChat, Mail, iPhoto, and Keynote, among others.
Spelling A World Of Words
MacSpeech Dictate's spelling mode lets you easily spell words, names, and acronyms with either natural language or the International Radio Alphabet. You have complete control over every aspect of your speech recognition input.
Make Your Move
You don't need a keyboard or mouse to move around in your documents. MacSpeech Dictate lets you move your cursor forwards, backwards, and much more with just your voice. It helps make editing your documents a breeze.
No Hidden Costs
MacSpeech Dictate includes everything you need to be instantly productive as soon as you start using it, including a high quality headset microphone.
Built Especially For The Mac
Mac users expect only the best from the applications they use on their Macs. MacSpeech Dictate was built from the ground up to ensure the ultimate experience on Mac OS X.
Exceptional Online Help
For those times when you need a little assistance, MacSpeech Dictate boasts a complete online, searchable help book. It's convenient to use, easy to understand, and all just a mouse click away.
MacSpeech Dictate provides a whole new way to interact with your Mac. Instead of typing, use your voice to input text; rather than clicking your mouse, just speak commands. With MacSpeech Dictate, it's easy.
In October 2018, Nuance announced that it has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac and will support it for only 90 days from activation in the US or 180 days in the rest of the world. The continuous speech-to-text software was widely considered to be the gold standard for speech recognition, and Nuance continues to develop and sell the Windows versions of Dragon Home, Dragon Professional Individual, and various profession-specific solutions.
This move is a blow to professional users—such as doctors, lawyers, and law enforcement—who depended on Dragon for dictating to their Macs, but the community most significantly affected are those who can control their Macs only with their voices.
What about Apple's built-in accessibility solutions? macOS does support voice dictation, although my experience is that it's not even as good as dictation in iOS, much less Dragon Professional Individual. Some level of voice control of the Mac is also available via Dictation Commands, but again, it's not as powerful as what was available from Dragon Professional Individual.
TidBITS reader Todd Scheresky is a software engineer who relies on Dragon Professional Individual for his work because he's a quadriplegic and has no use of his arms. He has suggested several ways that Apple needs to improve macOS speech recognition to make it a viable alternative to Dragon Professional Individual:
- Support for user-added custom words: Every profession has its own terminology and jargon, which is part of why there are legal, medical, and law enforcement versions of Dragon for Windows. Scheresky isn't asking Apple to provide such custom vocabularies, but he needs to be able to add custom words to the vocabulary to carry out his work.
- Support for speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition: Currently, macOS's speech recognition is speaker-independent, which means that it works pretty well for everyone. But Scheresky believes it needs to become speaker-dependent, so it can learn from your corrections to improve recognition accuracy. Also, Apple's speech recognition isn't continuous—it works for only a few minutes before stopping and needing to be reinvoked.
- Support for cursor positioning and mouse button events: Although Scheresky acknowledges that macOS's Dictation Commands are pretty good and provide decent support for text cursor positioning, macOS has nothing like Nuance's MouseGrid, which divides the screen into a 3-by-3 grid and enables the user to zoom in to a grid coordinate, then displaying another 3-by-3 grid to continue zooming. Nor does Apple have anything like Nuance's mouse commands for moving and clicking the mouse pointer.
When Scheresky complained to Apple's accessibility team about macOS's limitations, they suggested the Switch Control feature, which enables users to move the pointer (along with other actions) by clicking a switch. He talks about this in a video.
Unfortunately, although Switch Control would let Scheresky control a Mac using a sip-and-puff switch or a head switch, such solutions would be both far slower than voice and a literal pain in the neck. There are some better alternatives for mouse pointer positioning:
- Dedicated software, in the form of a $35 app called iTracker.
- An off-the-shelf hack using Keyboard Maestro and Automator.
- An expensive head-mounted pointing device, although the SmartNav is $600 and the HeadMouse Nano and TrackerPro are both about $1000. It's also not clear how well they interface with current versions of macOS.
Regardless, if Apple enhanced macOS's voice recognition in the ways Scheresky suggests, it would become significantly more useful and would give users with physical limitations significantly more control over their Macs… and their lives. If you'd like to help, Scheresky suggests submitting feature request feedback to Apple with text along the following lines (feel free to copy and paste it):
Because Nuance has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, it is becoming difficult for disabled users to use the Mac. Please enhance macOS speech recognition to support user-added custom words, speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition that learns from user corrections to improve accuracy, and cursor positioning and mouse button events.
Thank you for your consideration!
Dragon Speak For Mac User Manual Pdf
Registrationmac guidance services. Thanks for encouraging Apple to bring macOS's accessibility features up to the level necessary to provide an alternative to Dragon Professional Individual for Mac. Such improvements will help both those who face physical challenges to using the Mac and those for whom dictation is a professional necessity.
