Dragon for MAC 5.0, US ENGLISH (Discontinued)

I love dictating. It always helps me get a draft of a piece of fiction out quickly. If you have a MAC be aware that all the reviews about Dictation crashing in Word are TRUE. I dictation initially in RTF and it works like a dream. But when I turn the doc into a Word doc so I can have better formatting, etc. and I go to edit w/Dictate, it crashes a lot. It's reached the point that I save at every change which is kind of nuts. So I should just put the doc back into RTF if i want to edit w/dictation. I don't use it for emailing, social media, paper grading, but know people who do and say that it is very fast. I'm a little skittish because of the instability of Dragon outside of an RTF environment on a MAC. If you have a PC, you are all set. Still, despite the drawbacks, dictating is an incredible way to let your mind run free and to really produce work that I, at least, feel might never have been written if I hadn't been able to "talk" it. So, with a slight amount of care, it will work great for you.

This has been working great for my Macbook Pro. It seems to work best when I use the internal mic rather than a wireless headset. I highly recommend going through the tutorial a couple of times and you'll know how to do most things, i.e. quotation marks, capitalizing, etc. I use it back and forth with typing.You definitely need to keep an eye on it to be sure it is typing out everything the way you want it to, i.e. sense vs since, Jesus' vs Jesus is. It seems to work best for my sermon preparation so that I can ensure what is being written sounds okay spoken before writing it. It is great for pulling a quote from a book so you don't have to keep going back to it and copying. Also, it is better to speak in long sentences to it if you can because it seems to use the words that make more sense in the context of other words (e.g. if you used "sense").

Unfortunately, this product doesn't work at all on OS Sierra, much as Dragon for Mac 4 didn't work on El Capitan. Nuance agrees -- actually, their rep informed me of this, before passing me on to an entity call Digital River, promising me a substantial discount from that outfit on version 6. However, Digital River had not heard of this, and had no intention of offering any such discount. So version 6 will probably work until High Sierra -- is there a pattern here? Perhaps it should be clearly stated that the <$50 Dragon for Mac offerings will not work on current Apple OS iterations. So it's $300/year, much as a subscription, but without the candor. While not exactly brimming with ethical elegance, this is not, I suppose, criminal behavior. Though what is perplexing is that I've had a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking 12 for over six years on a Win 7 laptop, and it actually keeps getting better. So I suppose there's a robbing the rich to pay the poor theme, though I'm no longer sure if Apple owners are actually wealthier anymore. At any rate, this option will probably appeal only to the lower 99% anyway -- a fast-fading market (note Apple's slippage). Meantime: Gnucash, Office Libre, where are you! We need open source voice to text software so badly!!

When this software works smoothly, it works very well. It rarely works smoothly. In fact, this application is almost unusable because the time I spend talking, rather than typing, is chewed up fixing mistakes created by obvious glitches in the software. For example, the software will randomly move the insertion point for new text. Some times the cursor moves to the middle of a previous sentence. Some times the insertion point moves to select chunks of previous text and then types over that text. Some times finishing a sentence will result in a number of the the lines after the end of the paragraph being deleted so that the beginning of the following paragraph is chewed up. Some times the application will insert, persistently after each sentence, an extra letter extra letter like is an "M" or a "t." I've seen these problems when using DragonDictate in Word, in iAWriter, in Scrivener, and in Ulysses. I also have no idea how to find a fix. The company's tech support page is a morass of unhelpful threads. I have seen people complaining about this kind of problem in threads going back YEARS without anyone from the company seeming to acknowledge the problem, much less fix it. These customers complain about this problem going back several versions, but say that Dragon for Windows works much, much better. I have DragonDictate 4.0 the Mac and had the same problems with that software. I would like to be able to simply turn off all the "helpful" features for navigating text, but the manual does not tell me how to disable that functionality. The software also seems to decide randomly whether to begin dictation with a capital letter or to insert a space before producing the words that I spoke. Sometimes I expect a capital letter and I don't get it. Other times, the problem is the opposite. New sentences, even those at the beginning of a paragraph, often begin with the space. Other times, new sentences start directly up against the end of the previous sentence. I cannot determine any pattern for these decisions. Moreover, this version of the application seems to be a step back from the 4.0 version. It is much harder in this version, as far as I can tell, to teach the software new words on the go or to correct common mistakes. The core functionality shows such promise, but the whole package is SUCH a disappointment. So damn sad to see such a wonderful technology buried behind so many glitches.

I purchased this purely for the ability to transcribe MP3 files. I'm doing some qualitative research which is interview-intensive, and the transcription is time-consuming. Setup/operation on my MacBook Pro was easy and intuitive. With a best-case recording, I achieved about 65% accuracy in the transcriptions. Correcting them still took some time but was worth the price for me. The key is to do your recording with as little background noise as possible. In three test cases, I had a quiet environment (a closed room), a "medium" noise area (hotel lobby), and a "loud" environment (restaurant) for the interviews. The best result was the recording with no background noise. The restaurant recording failed completely and would not transcribe at all. The program struggles with technical jargon and speaker accents. It is a work in progress but useful for qualitative research in a controlled environment.

I began using Dragon for Mac a few years ago in my medical practice. In recent years, I began using Dragon to type at home even though I'm a fairly good typist, because I found the Dragon made fewer mistakes. in fact, Dragon was so good and so fast that I used it to write a 450 page book "common sense is not all that common him" which was published by Amazon's create space this past July. I recently purchased Dragon for mac 5.0, which I found to be a distinct improvement over the 4.0 version. It seems somewhat faster and is definitely more accurate. The new interface is far easier to use than the one that appeared in the previous version. I particularly like how I can easily correct mistakes with verbal commands. However the software does have some shortcomings, which become prominent during the editing process where the cursor tends to jump around the page spontaneously or directions are, at times, not followed is expected. This clearly is a serious defect, which nuance needs to correct. I would recommend this program to anyone who needs to type a significant amount of material on a Mac computer because, at this point in time, there is no better software for this purpose.

Great Product! When we bought the "Dragon for MAC 5.0" we didn't think it would do much but when we used the product it worked like a charm. it had great voice recognition and had some overall great futures. this is 100% worth the money and it 100% the best speech to text software out there! (PRO TIP: if you are buying this for mac book air you will need a disk reader that can ve used with the mac) Dragon for MAC 5.0 Dragon for MAC 5.0

I am a long-time user of Dragon NaturallySpeaking for PC, so I was nervous about the Mac version, which I had reason to believe was unsatisfactory for my purposes in its earlier versions. But 5.0 works very well – both with Pages, etc. and with Microsoft Office 2016 in its version for the Mac. And downloading, installing, and starting it up each day is much superior to doing those things on a PC. So I give it five stars.

The product works very well now. i have used it in a number of applications with excellent success. It gets confused which homonym to use but I correct that manually. It has words like "Alan" and "Allan" or "Philip" and "Phillip" in its vocabulary but I cannot find a way to tell it which one to choose. But those are minor. Essentially, it gives me 90+% accuracy and saves a lot of time and finger arthritic pain. The instructions are not as clear as they should be. I had problems setting it up and there was no manual to help correct it. I had to uninstall and re-install before it worked properly. It does an excellent job of separating voice from background noise or other people talking.

I had a major problem with v5 (does not recognize any commands, either by speech or using HotKeys, so effectively you are unable to correct anything except manually and you cannot train it), and after MANY tech support phone calls, in which for the most part I was made to feel as though the problem was on my end or it would be briefly resolved then recur and I would be told I just need to continue to call tech support as if I have nothing else to do during the course of the day then spend hours on the phone with them, I requested a refund and upgrade to 6 (eventually tech support told me that I needed to upgrade and that was the issue). Ok, fine. SAME PROBLEM, among others. At this point, I could not count the lost hours of productivity trying to get this thing working. I have even tried it on three different computers (MacBook Air, Pro, and the newest MacBook), all plagued by this same and other issues. I almost never leave reviews but this is just so bad.