Dragon Anywhere for IOS

Hi, Anybody using or would recommend Dragon Anywhere for IOS with a monthly subscription ? Thanks

On the recent subscriptions episode @MacSparky mentioned that the quality of Dragon Anywhere had a precipitous decline recently and that he’d dropped his subscription.

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Ok thanks @ChrisUpchurch just starting that episode, I think I will just have to learn to type faster :slight_smile:

I am flummoxed about how bad it has gotten. I’m getting much better results these days with the Siri dictation, which did not use to be true.

Thank you David @MacSparky , I think I will avoid this one also, appreciate the advice about Siri dictation will give it a try. Thanks again Stuart

My suspicion is that something is going on at Nuance. It can’t be a coincidence that they’ve stopped selling the Mac dragon dictate AND the quaility of their iOS product has plummeted at the same time.

I hope that all the Mac and iOS staff are now all working in a joint venture with Apple and they’re revving up the built in Mac and iOS dictation.

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Agreed as dictation is really useful. I’m riding our Dragon Dictate 5 and awaiting what I’ll use next.

I was told … but I have not confirmed … that Apple set up a dictation team in Massachusetts very close to Nuance HQ. If that’s true, wouldn’t be surprised if they are hiring Nuance people. That could explain improvements in Siri Dictation and loss of interest in Apple by Nuance. This is all conjecture though.

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Nuance revenues have been flat for at least five years, with an average Net Loss of $150 million/year since at least 2014, and there has been some executive turmoil at the company. In 2018 they had turnover of seven new individuals installed to the Board of Directors, which is unusual, and they appointed a new Chairman of the Board, and they hired a new CEO (the former COO of NCR Corp) to replace the retiring CEO who’d shepherded Nuance since 2000.

Their annual report last November made clear that they’ve decided focus on “opportunities that leverage our core strengths in key vertical markets” - markets where Nuance makes most of its money, with higher margins: healthcare transcription, automative, telecom (customer service voicemail trees), imaging… all enterprise clients. They apparently decided the consumer space was insufficiently profitable to support, especially with the competitive tsunami of Google/Apple/Amazon/Microsoft coming on to swamp all the IOTs.

Rumors about Apple picking off devs from the company seem incidental to their decision to abandon the consumer market. Company’s been in financial trouble for years and in 2018 (to mix metaphors) they ripped off the Band-Aid and decided to retrench.

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