Dragon Professional for Mac V6: Near perfect dictation

You have to hand it to Nuance. The latest Dragon Professional voice recognition software is impressive. So is its business model.

Dragon’s software is expensive by today’s standards. A single user licence for Dragon Professional version 6 costs US$300. You can buy a PC for less.

Keep in mind both Apple and Microsoft include voice recognition software as part of their operating systems. Neither application is free, but they are already paid for. So, in effect, Dragon is, asking people to pay again for something they already have.

That puts the business’s livelihood on the line. To make it work, Dragon has to offer something special. It does that. Dragon Professional version 6 performs far better than the alternatives from Apple and Microsoft. It uses something called deep learning to improve accuracy.

Dragon Professional more accurate than alternatives

Dragon claims this means the software has 99 percent recognition accuracy. There’s no easy way to verify the claim, but in testing the software does a near perfect job of turning spoken words into computer text.

What the numbers don’t tell you is that even a small improvement in voice recognition accuracy means a vast improvement in the experience. The difference between going back and correcting every tenth word, 90 percent accuracy, and every hundredth word, 99 percent accuracy is huge.

You can improve performance by training the software. If you’re committed to using Dragon, then investing some time makes sense. Yet in practice the software works so well out of the box you might decide to just get on with it.

It seems the software does some form of training when in use. Every so often there’s a message to say Dragon is updating your profile.

Integrated app

Dragon Professional isn’t a stand-alone application. It is integrated into the operating system. It works with other apps. Apple Pages and Microsoft Word are the obvious candidates, but any program using text input should work.

It works with almost every Mac app that uses keyboard input. In theory you can control less word-oriented apps such as image editors, but that doesn’t make practical sense. Having said that, Dragon Professional is excellent at performance everyday MacOS commands. It would be an ideal tool if you had access problems with your hands.

A small icon appears in the Mac’s menu bar, in much the same way as other system level apps. When the software is in use a small floating window opens on the screen with three more icons. There’s also a guidance window with help when you need it.

For most of the time the second window keeps out of the way. The main one is small enough to not be a distraction. The microphone icon shows green when it is on and red when it off, otherwise there’s not much to see.

If you like using the cursor you can switch between Dictation, Command, Spelling and Numbers mode using the main floating window.

There’s a transcription mode which allows you to turn audio files into text. It’s a lot more hit and miss than the normal dictation software. It manages to cope with a few minutes of audio where there is only one speaker, but chokes if you attempt to transcribe, say, an interview with two people talking.

A personal productivity note

While the technology in Dragon’s latest voice recognition software is impressive, it’s not for me. After forty years of touch typing, I write with my fingertips. Any attempt to compose faultless prose using my voice ends in an embarrassing mess.

That’s not to say I don’t make typing errors. Anyone who has read my tweets can see that. Yet the flow of my writing is so much better when I hit keys than when I speak. No doubt that would change if I spent thousands of hours improving my technique. Simple economics says I’m better off sticking with what I know.

Take this blog post as Illustrating how this works. I started out trying to use the Dragon Professional software to write the post.

It was a disaster. Although professional scribes are taught to ‘write like you talk’, that advice is not meant to be taken literally. When I gave up on voice recognition, I hit the ground running and finished the post in minutes.

There’s another problem that may affect some readers. I feel self-conscious and uncomfortable when dictating to a machine. There’s nothing worse than knowing people can hear you as you compose a story. That’s not an issue when I type.

While we are on the personal stuff I should mention another major plus for Dragon. Most voice recognition tools struggle with my accent. It’s a hybrid British-antipodean thing.

UK voice recognition settings don’t work for me. Nor do New Zealand ones. Oddly, Australian settings get me the best result on Apple equipment. Nothing seems to cope with my voice on Microsoft systems. Dragon Professional worked out of the box even though the settings are hard-wired to New Zealand.

Verdict

All the above leaves me in an odd position. I’m about to recommend a product that I wouldn’t normally use myself. So let’s run through the main points again. Dragon Professional version 6 does an excellent job of turning spoken words into text. The software is accurate and reliable. It also provides a great way to control a Mac when you can’t or don’t want to use hands.