Dragon For Mac 5.0

Nuance Dragon for Mac 5.0.5 Whether you’re creating documents, spreadsheets or presentations, sending emails, filling out forms or simply looking to reduce typing stress, Dragon for Mac drives productivity at work. Dragon for MAC Medical 5.0 2 Devices $ 999.00 A flexible speech recognition solution that enables the clinician to quickly capture comprehensive clinical documentation while spending more time on what matters—their patients.

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Here are some first impressions of 'Dragon for Mac 5', which I downloaded at a special offer price and installed last week. It is the latest version of what used to be called DragonDictate for Mac.

I am a rusted-on Mac user, and for a number of years I have run Dragon NaturallySpeaking on my Mac with a Windows virtualisation app (Parallels). I have not bothered with any Dragon for Mac product since DragonDictate 2, which was appallingly bad – highly restricted functionality as compared with NS, and worst of all, it went haywire when you tried to correct using a combination of voice and keystrokes. So I don't know to what extent this new version is an improvement on the last version of DragonDictate.

Anyway, the positives. I assume the recognition engine is the same as used in the latest version of NS, and it's terrific – extremely accurate without any training. No complaints.

Secondly, for a Mac user, far more control over the computer, which obviously you don't get running NS on a virtual machine. Also, you can dictate straight into Mac apps. For the first time ever, I am dictating this into a browser on my Mac. That wasn't such a problem before because the vast majority of my dictation is done into Word and the Parallels interface is so good that for all intents and purposes you can dictate into a Mac word document with NS – you just choose to open the Word document on your Mac in Windows and all the changes are saved in the Mac document when you close it. But it's good to be able to dictate straight into Mac Mail, for example.

The negatives. I understand that Nuance don't put anything like the resources into Mac versions that they put into Windows products and it still shows. For example, when you insert new dictated text into existing text, there are too many little glitches like trailing spaces at the start of the insertion and no space at the end, and/or unnecessary capitalisation, and/or a lack of necessary capitalisation. I'm also noticing dictating here into Chrome that there is a real issue with confusion about capitalisation which I haven't found with Word.

Also they haven't totally eliminated the confusion that the app sometimes experiences when you amend using voice and keystrokes. A minor complaint is the lack of standardisation in commands between NS and Dragon for Mac. I'm having to learn a slew of new commands that seem pointlessly different, for example 'undo last action' instead of 'undo that' or 'right arrow' instead of 'move right', etc. Amazingly, there is no 'go to end of line' command. There is no 'bold on', 'underline on' etc command. You have to say 'press the keys command b'. When I tried to create a custom command according to the instructions, it didn't work.

Compounding this is the fact that I have had real trouble creating custom commands generally but I'm reserving judgment on that in case I am, somehow, doing something wrong.

There is no word training facility by voice. You can add words to the vocabulary, but not train them by voice. There is the facility of typing in another word that your new word sounds like! The app is said to learn from your corrections, but how this is achieved is a mystery.

Corrections are clunky compared to NS. You can't say 'correct that'. You have to first select the text, then say 'correct that', or 'correct [text]', and you can't just say 'spell that'.

Finally, this particular exercise in dictation into Chrome is turning into a total disaster: all the old faults of DragonDictate are reemerging. It's going haywire. Perhaps it's just a factor of dictating into this app, because Word and Mail haven't been too bad.

These are only first impressions. I think this app will be useful for me, within its limitations, but it's no substitute for NS.

Tom