Review Nuance Dragon For Mac

Looking for a review of Version 6? Today Dragon Dictate Version 5 (renamed “Dragon for Mac”) was released. It’s a major upgrade from Nuance who are the creators of Dragon Naturally Speaking. They have flagged the importance of this release with the name change from ‘Dragon Dictate’ to simply ‘Dragon for Mac’. It looks different and it feels different, my overall my initial response is it’s the best and worst version of Dragon so far.

Worst because it crashes a lot. The best because of the design and accuracy. SUMMARY: The Good: Incredibly accurate. Does not require significant time to be trained. The Bad: Slow to Load. Problems with capitalisation and spacing. The Ugly: Crashes a lot.

Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac commands a hefty price tag, and though it's available in both boxed and digital versions, Nuance offers no discount on the latter, despite it not including the documentation and wired headset which comes with the boxed version. This review is based upon the digital version. The new version of Dragon for Mac version 6 was released this week. Here's why you shouldn't buy it. UPDATE 28/9/2016: I received a personal phone call from Jeff Lieman, the manager of Engineering at Nuance, encouraging me to try out and review the new version, Dragon 6.01, which.

Does not work with Microsoft Office 2016. UPDATE: This review was done in September 2015 and my conclusion was to ‘wait for the first bug fix release to get a more stable product.‘ It’s now four months later. We are up to Dragon version 5.0.4, and based on my own experience and the comments of people below, it’s not getting any better. In fact it’s now become so unstable under ‘El Capitan’ that I’ve had to stop using it. I have gone back to using the built-in dictation, which is pretty painful, but at least it doesn’t crash!

Improvements Integration The most obvious difference is that the Dragon Dictate Application seems to have completely disappeared as an app and it has more or less integrated itself into the operating system. This is fantastic. It doesn’t feel like Dragon is now a clunky add on application – it feels like part of OS X itself. If you have the status window hidden, the only way you know Dragon for Mac is running is that it appears in a small menu icon at the top right of your screen. You can access the Dragon menu commands from whatever app you happen to be in. It feels more integrated into other applications than the previous version of Dragon. You can be dictating into Apple Pages and access the Dragon menu to do ‘vocabulary training’ or ‘microphone setup’ without switching apps.

The new Dragon menu is available from any application you are in. There is no longer a separate ‘note pad’ application to dictate into, rather Nuance have designed Dragon to dictate into any app. Now they haven’t fully pulled this off yet – see the comments below under ‘integration into applications’ – but this is certainly a step in the right direction. Aesthetics Dragon for Mac looks a lot prettier. If you say ’show status window’ (or select it from the Dragon menu) the new status window appears.