#Dragon dictate 4.0 for mac install
#Dragon dictate 4.0 for mac software

When that’s done, you’re good to go.įor dictation, you can choose from various input options, including your computer’s built-in mic, or the recommended (and included) Nuance-approved noise-canceling USB headset microphone.

After setting up your profile, you begin a 5-10 minute training exercise in which you familiarize Dragon Dictate with your voice by reading a set of pre-prepared passages. It wants you to create a profile for each person who will be speaking, and ideally, whether they are actively dictating or being transcribed (more on that part later).

#Dragon dictate 4.0 for mac install

Once you install the software, it invites you to set up a profile. I haven’t run previous versions of Dragon Dictate for Mac, but Nuance claims that version 4 is “up to 99% accurate” which they say is an improvement (though they don’t indicate how much of an improvement) over version 3 of the software. If you’re like me, the most important feature of a speech recognition package is its ability to, well, recognize speech.

#Dragon dictate 4.0 for mac software

Now in its 13th version for Windows and 4th generation for the Mac (under the label Dragon Dictate), the software is developed by Nuance, a company whose voice recognition technology also powers Siri and plenty of other services.ĭespite the proliferation of speech recognition software for smartphones and tablets, there are still plenty of reasons to consider a full-blown version of this software for your computer. Transcription from speech spoken through the mic provided is accurate as you can see below.īut transcriptions from recordings result in gibberish and you'll have to make so many corrections that you'd be better off doing it manually to begin with.But before all of these gadgets entered our lives, there was Dragon Naturally Speaking software. It will then carry on this training period for another 60 seconds before setting off in transcribing the whole audio file. You then have to accept text it got right (you listen to snippets of audio) or ignore it. This means the application listening to 90 seconds of recording and then outputting text. m4v.īefore processing a file for transcription, you need to set up a profile for it. Dragon can accept audio in any popular format such as. Has Nuance managed to solve the problem of having to manually transcribe recordings with the latest version of the software? In theory, this feature should make it easy to gleam notes from recordings of lectures, phone calls or meetings.

If you don't, the dictation will be one huge chunk of text. While you don't have to talk like a robot, you're still required to recite punctuation out loud and this takes getting used to. Dictation technology remains unable to assess when punctuation is needed, so you still have to complete sentences by saying 'full stop' or insert pauses by saying 'comma'. This allows you to tune it up, with the expectation it will make fewer errors down the line. Obviously, the more processing power your machine has, the smoother Dragon Dictate will run.Īfter installation, your first task is to train the software. This should benefit in reduced latency over previous versions and quicker editing.

In reality this means that it will happily turn speech into text without hogging system resources. The application is now pure 64-bit and so enables higher performance and improved memory management. Nuance recommends using a machine with at least an Intel Core i3 processor and 4GB of RAM.