A Dragon Dictate supporter's club

Software
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Any Dragon users over here?

I am mindful of maybe it just being my experience of things – but then again…

I’m running High Sierra, and the previous version of Dragon Dictate for Mac (v 5.0.5).
I might have upgraded, but then I started seeing quite negative feedback on their forums about the latest version, so decided to hold back, especially given the upgrade pricing…

Only for them to seemingly close the forum down, over at Nuance??
Granted, it was not a very positive place, given the negative views being shared regarding the product-line for the Mac, but it really left me in the dark.

And don’t get me started on how I struggled to confirm if V5 would work on Sierra, much less High Sierra - eventually, I gave up trying to reach them, and took the plunge…

When it works, it works well.
For a while. But then a Quit and Restart of it, generally fixes things.
But I have given up trying to do anything approaching complicated with it.
I cannot edit anything in the vocab anymore, with it crashing - but this is probably down to my not running the latest version…

I still find it better than the system dictation, which is not bad, but Dragon - hamstrung as my version is – still offers more features in terms of correcting words, spelling mode, capitalisation etc.

I basically only use it inside Scrivener, since trying it in Word was a mess.

Anyone else care to share some experiences?

I’m particularly interested in those running the new Dragon Professional Individual for Mac (essentially V6)?
Any major stability improvements i.r.o. Word, Outlook and Scrivener?
Was it worth the upgrade price?

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@BradG I abandoned Dragon Dictate for mac at v5. It just wasn’t up to it. I spent more time trying to make it work than being productive.

I have since run DNS15 Professional on my MacBook Pro boot camp partition. It is infinitely superior to the mac’s significantly hamstrung second cousin. I have a Philips DPM 9600 dictaphone and the auto transcribe features in the windows version are far superior. It saves in plaintext or word onto iCloud and so on completion available almost instantly on my mac.

Co-incidentally three days ago I installed Parallels to see if I could run it alongside Mac OS rather than having to re-boot into Windows each time. I have been very impressed so far.

My recommendation is that if you are after comprehensive voice recognition solution for mac, DNS via boot camp or Parallels is the way to go.

If you are not aware already, the Knowbrainer Forums are a great source of information for Dragon (both windows and to a lesser extent mac).

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Appreciate the reply!

Will check out Knowbrainer, was not aware of it.

I have Parallels, and toyed with the idea, but unless I am mistaken, working from within the Parallels’ version of Dragon, will still not see it being able to ‘function’ inside the Mac apps? Is that correct?

In other words, your use of it (in Parallels/Win) is essentially the ‘transcription’ feature - dictating ‘complete’ documents/text records - getting the end-result into the Cloud, and then taking it from there to use where needed over on macOS?

[Edit]: Wow. That was a dose of reality. Based on the majority of responses over on Knowbrainer, think that if one were seriously wanting to dive into dictation, beyond the masOS built-in options, then the only viable option would be to look seriously at Parallels, Windows, and the PC version of Dragon Dictate. Pity, but I guess that’s what it is.

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In college I used DNS to dictate essay responses, it was vastly better then version 5 on my Mac. I too have been hesitant to upgrade to version 6. David still I think uses Dragon though he said that it’s such a niche market that there’s not a payoff to invest in the Apple side of dictation for Mac.

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@BradG, yes sadly DNS in windows via Parallels wont “function” inside Mac OS apps. But you can dictate into Word or other plain text and cut and past over.

Essentially, its a feasible if not great dictation solution to use for writing and document production but not operating Mac OS.

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Tha’s a bummer, I wish it was more full fledged

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I just got DNS Version 15. It is much better with Dictation than Dragon for Mac version five. I thought it much easier to add and correctly repeat nnew vocabulary. You can correct transcripted sources as well. Unfortunately, I do not have the hardware to run parallels adequately. So, I bought an extremely cheap and refurbished windows laptop to run a copy of dragon. The windows laptop is hooked into my network via ethernet.It is loaded onto my Mac has a server. I wish sharing text was more seamless But the increased productivity that the windows Product has is worth the hassle.

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Interesting, is there a simple program that’s text based for Mac and Windows that can sync over text files? Maybe SublimeText or something of the sort?

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I think I am making the sharing of text sound more onerous that it actually is. I’m loading the window server with keyboard Maestro. The files are easily accessible with Pathfinder. Having said that, I created a separate dropbox account for the windows machine and shared two connect folders for any files that I wish to transfer via iOS. I did see a utility that copied the clipboard using Google drive as intermediary. Although it seems a little hypocritical, considering I did load up dropbox, I am trying to keep the number of outward connections for the windows server to a minimum.

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I extensively tried using DD V6. Buggy at best.

In my opinion, Apple paid a lot of money to Dragon for the capabilities to be built in to OSX. (At least that is what I heard years ago.) Nuance just doesn’t seem to have the motivation to build a better OSX product.

With that said, I am trying to go all in with the Dictation built into OSX. I recently learned that you can create custom commands, launch automator scripts, and more with the built in Dictation.

Dragon on iOS has been pretty good for me. $15/month is a lot but that has worked better for me than the OSX version.

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Stephen, can you please tell us a little more about Dragon Anywhere? I know that David Sparks loves it, but I am not sure about this product. Of course, I can test it, free of charge, for 7 days. But the reviews in the App Store are not very positive.

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The app itself is not very complicated. You create a new document or open an existing one, click on a button and dictate. An internet connection is required and the quality of the transcription is better than iOS’s. Even though an internet connection is required, the speed of the transcription is very fast.

You can add custom words, make corrections. I find the transcription is noticeably better than the dictation built into iOS and OSX when using “industry” lingo. Everyday word accuracy seems to be about the same. The custom words/phrases sync’s with Dragon Dictate.

I haven’t used the feature, but I think you can manually sync selected documents with Dropbox.

I tend to use the app split screen with PDF Expert while taking notes.

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Hey all, thinking of upgrading my microphone I use with Dragon Naturally Speaking Version 5, any good suggestions? I’m currently using a headset which is fine but can cause fatigue over long periods of dictation.

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I am using an AT2020 On a boom. Great accuracy without the literal headache. I am using the xlr version with a blue icicle, but there is a USB version.

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Wonderful I’ll look into that

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I use the latest Mac version of Dragon, but mostly dictate chunks of text into Dictate+Connect on my iPhone and send it automatically to Dropbox for transcription on the Mac (Ver 6 is way better than 5 was in this regard). I’ve all but given up on using the live DD dictation.

P.S. I sold my dictaphone because Dictate+Connect is so good.

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Have you noticed an issue about working in Google Chrome or Google docs with Dragon Dictate?

@StephenL are you still on Version 6 instead of 5? I’m intrigued at using Dictate+Connect with my iPhone as @AndySaff has suggested.