Many people have asked me “Does Dragon Dictate for Mac work?” and the simple answer to this question is, yes it does, but you would expect me to say that!
I recently read an article by Gareth Huw Davies, a writer for the Daily Mail and freelancer for the Times on Sunday, who also writes for various companies. In this article, he summarises his experience of using Dragon on both a PC and a Mac, and thought it would be good to paraphrase the article here, and have also included the link to the full article below.
In this article, he states that he started using Dragon many years ago on the PC and that it was a revolution in his writing life, and that he used to write feature articles based on hour-long interviews, and it would often take a morning or more of heavy keyboard labour to transcribe them.
He progressed through several upgrades on the PC, and Dragon became gradually more accurate, but in 2010, switched to a MacBook, and for a time was adrift. He recalls that there was a rather unsatisfactory alternative which did work on the Mac (MacSpeech), but it was not very good!
Then in 2011, the first version of Nuance’s Dragon Dictate for the Mac was introduced.
Now, he is using Dragon Dictate version 4 for Mac, which has been recently released.
Mac users will know that there is a dictation tool in the Mavericks operating system, but it is very basic. Dragon Dictate however, is a fully-fledged dictation programme, and has a lot more features to make life easier!
GH Davies suggests that he is not a fast typist but that one of the benefits of dictating text is that it lets you try forms of words very quickly, and then try another just as quickly to see if that works better. He says that writers have always done this with pen and paper or typewriters, but it is a lengthy process!
Dragon Dictate also works well with the microphone built into the Macbook!
It is also very useful for proof reading your work…
“Dragon Dictate can read text back to you, whether you want to hear a specific selection, or an entire document. Hearing your text can help you catch mistakes, especially ones that a spelling or grammar checker might miss, and it lets you listen to the flow of your writing, so you can decide where to make changes during editing.”
This is very helpful when working to tight deadlines!
It is also possible to transfer a pre-recorded file from another device such as an iPhone, although this technique is possibly not as accurate.
The overall verdict? Dragon Dictate for the Mac has become a powerful assistant, willing to take over most, if not all, of the tedious work we used to do on the keyboard.
The link to the full article is here…
