While it flubbed the introduction of the text, overall it did a surprisingly credible job at the transcription. That said, Dragon’s result was surprisingly good. Laptop mics are generally very low-quality and, unless you push your face right up against the machine to speak, they can be easily overcome by ambient noise.
#DRAGON DICTATE 2.5 FOR MAC REVIEW WINDOWS#
To take the test further, I also used both Dragon and Windows with the microphone built into my laptop, to see how realistic it would be to dictate text into thin air. Overall, even allowing for cleaning up the minor errors that Dragon made, I achieved a solid 60 percent increase in overall input speed over typing. Windows, on the other hand, had trouble with a few words, including the tricky “lonesome” and some less obvious ones, like mistaking “man” for “men.” Of course, the biggest trip-up with Windows was the name “Kilgore Trout,” which it comically rendered as “co court route.” Dragon, much to my surprise, not only got “Kilgore” right, but correctly capitalized the last name of Trout without being explicitly told to do so. As you can see from test results document, Dragon nearly nailed the transcription straight out of the gate.
I found that Dragon did the clearly better job. I tested Dragon against both Windows 7’s and Windows 8’s built-in speech recognition, using a high-end headset and the first lines of Breakfast of Champions as a guide. NaturallySpeaking supports a number of accents including “teen.” Mastering all the ins and outs of the application, though, could very well take a lifetime. Training NaturallySpeaking 13 takes all of a minute, and the basics are handled by a simple walkthrough. Otherwise, you can dictate into just about any text-centric app, right down to Notepad. The app also now supports the built-in microphones installed on most laptops instead of just external mics, and you can dictate directly to major web browsers-Internet Explorer 9 and up, Chrome, or Firefox-so you can finally speak your Tweets, Facebook status, and blog posts instead of having to type them.
#DRAGON DICTATE 2.5 FOR MAC REVIEW SOFTWARE#
But will a $100 price tag and an incremental improvement in quality finally make you talk the talk?Īs its key enhancement, Dragon says this release of the software is 15 percent more accurate than Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12. Nonetheless, Dragon is hoping to entice new users to the product by adding new features and cutting the price of last year’s $200 release. At this point in the game, anyone who wants to use speech recognition software is probably already using it. Now in its 17 th year and its 13 th release, Dragon NaturallySpeaking remains the benchmark for Windows-based speech-to-text technology.
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