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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 â€˜Dragon Dictateâ€™ to simply â€˜Dragon for Macâ€™. 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: Englishms. schrader's teaching portfolio organizer.

The Good: Incredibly accurate. Fast. Looks great. Does not require significant time to be trained.

Shop Best Buy for Dragon Naturally Speaking and Dragon Dictate software for your Mac or Windows PC. Shop voice recognition software options available at Best Buy. Dragon Dictate for Mac, version 4 merges fast, accurate speech recognition and versatile transcription to fit the way you work. Dictate and edit documents, send email, transcribe voice memos from. While Dragon Dictate Medical for Mac is a speech recognition product based on Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking technology, it is not 'Dragon Medical on the Mac'. Meaning, spoken audio is recognized by the Dragon speech engine, but that is where any further similarities end. Mac users do not have the range of options PC users have when it comes to voice recognition software, but Dragon for Mac is a remedy for that problem. There are features that equal what we have seen in PC-geared software. However, this speech-to-text software's dictation abilities aren't quite as smooth as higher-ranked competitors.

The Bad: Slow to Load. Problems with capitalisation and spacing.

The Ugly: Crashes a lot. Unstable. 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!

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 â€˜vocabulary trainingâ€™ or â€˜microphone setupâ€™ without switching apps.

The new Dragon menu is available from any application you are in.

Dragon Speaks For Machine

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 â€™show status windowâ€™ (or select it from the Dragon menu) the new status window appears. It’s is a huge improvement on the old one. Instead of being that ugly black colour from the 1980s, the status window has been redesigned with the OSX and iOS 8 look and feel.

For example here are some pictures of the status window.

As well as giving you a volume level it displays tips of what you can say. These tips are really useful, especially for new users to Dragon, although I’ve been using it for years and I still found them useful. The suggestions vary depending on the context – where your cursor is.

The status window with some text selected.

Accuracy

The speech recognition accuracy seems fairly similar to what it was in Dragon 4 (I was running Dragon 4 with the ‘accuracy’ set to maximum.) Dragon claim an accuracy improvement of 15%. That might be true but it’s hard to notice. I imported my old speech profile across to Dragon for Mac and the amount of mistakes that are being made doesn’t seem to have changed significantly. I’m not coming away thinking â€˜wow, this is a huge improvement in the speech recognition accuracy.’ I am coming away with a big wow in terms of the ability to dictate without any training – more about that later.

Speed

The lack of noticeable improvement in accuracy is more than made up for in the speed improvement. The speed at which the speed recognition is done is incredible! The text appears almost instantaneously the moment you stop speaking. In Dragon Dictate version 4 there was a noticeable lag between the end of your sentence and when the text was pasted into the application.

In version 4 there was also a setting for you to choose between ‘accuracy’ and ‘ speed.’ There was a trade-off between the two. Running at the ‘accurate’ end of the spectrum, I found Dragon Dictate slightly too slow, whereas running at the ‘speed’ end of the spectrum I found that Dragon Dictate made too many mistakes. That setting has disappeared and the new Dragon for Mac seems to be running at full speed and full accuracy. So overall there is a noticeable improvement in performance.

Training

For the first time ever, you can now use Dragon without any training at all! In every previous version of Dragon Dictate you had to spend 5 to 10 minutes in front of the computer reading to it so that it could learn to adapt to your voice. This might not be an unreasonable investment given the time that you will save in using Dragon, but it is a bit of a downer when you first receive the software to have to sit through all the training. Remarkably, Dragon for Mac recognises your speech very accurately with no training at all. I dictated the second half of this article right in an untrained profile of Dragon for Mac and it was very usable straight out of the box with no voice training!

There is an option for extra ‘Voice Training’ if you want to improve the accuracy.

Sadly there are way too many issues with Dragon for Mac. It’s almost like a beta testing version. If buggy software annoys you it’s probably worth waiting for the next minor upgrade date before you upgrade.

Slowness to Load

Once Dragon for Mac is running, the speech recognition is fast, but the application itself is terribly slow to install and to load. When Dragon for Mac is launched there is a message “Dragon is Starting up…’ and Dragon for Mac takes about 30 seconds to load. Most of my other apps take 1-2 seconds to launch. My MacMini takes 15 seconds for the entire boot process. So it takes twice as long to load Dragon as it does to boot my entire OS X.

During installation there were lots of spinning beach balls with no indication as to whether my computer had crashed or was still doing something.

Crashing during Training

The first problem I encountered, and I have to admit it was a pretty major one, is that when I did have a go at ‘voice training’ (I couldn’t help myself) Dragon for Mac crashed about 5 minutes into the process, losing all of the training I had done. Even when it goes smoothly, training is a pain in the neck – sitting at your computer reading monotonous passages – it’s worse when it crashes! I didn’t bother retraining to see if the accuracy improved.

The training passages are exactly the same ones that Nuance used in previous versions of Dragon so it’s not real exciting reading. (Yes it’s the same readings about the difference between â€˜ice creamâ€™ and â€˜I scream.â€™ aaaarrrrgh)

Integration into Applications

Dragon for Mac is designed to dictate into any application, so that you do not need a separate app like ‘Notepad’.

You cannot mix typing and speaking in any app – Dragon gets confused. But Nuance claim that Dragon has been designed to work especially well Microsoft Word and Text Edit. I don’t have Microsoft Word, I use Apple’s pages. It seems a strange choice that Dragon would