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Dragon adds Recorder app for time-shifted desktop dictation

by Michael Rose Oct 19th 2011 at 11:59PM

It's all about speech on the iPhone 4S, from the systemwide dictation features to the inscrutable but very helpful Siri assistant. The fine folks at Nuance (suppliers of some of the underlying IP that powers the 4S voice savvy) have made a big move into the mobile space; the company already has a suite of iOS apps that cover several speech-related functions.

There's Dragon Dictation for text entry, Dragon Go! and Search for finding what you need, Dragon for SalesForce to work with your CRM system, two Dragon Medical apps for search and recording, and the Dragon Remote Mic app that turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a networked microphone for the company's desktop dictation apps (Dragon Dictate for Mac or NaturallySpeaking for Windows). Now there's another member of this growing family: the Dragon Recorder app.

Dragon Recorder is a free and straightforward voice recording app designed to pair with the company's transcription software; on the Mac, that means the $150 MacSpeech Scribe application. You can use Recorder to record your voice (only yours; Scribe and its Windows sister product are speaker-dependent) on the go, and then easily transfer the recordings via sync or Wi-Fi browser sharing for later transcription.

Of course, you could use the built-in Voice Memos application to achieve much the same result, but you wouldn't get the Wi-Fi sharing feature. Then again, if you're planning to do a lot of mobile dictation, I'd recommend picking up Irradiated Software's drop-dead easy DropVox for $1.99 -- forget transferring your files by sync or by click, they'll just show up automatically in your Dropbox folder ready for transcription. (There's no step 3.)

It remains to be seen how much of an impact the new on-device dictation capabilities will have on the pro-level dictation and transcription software market, but if you're already a MacSpeech Scribe user then it's worth giving Recorder a try... that is, if you're not already feeling silly talking to Siri.



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It's all about speech on the iPhone 4S, from the systemwide dictation features to the inscrutable but very helpful Siri assistant. The...
 

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Michael Long

"... that is, if you're not already feeling silly talking to Siri..."

Siri and I are getting along quite well, actually.

October 20 2011 at 3:06 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Christopher Payne

I really love Dragon Dictate for Mac: it's incredibly accurate.

However MacSpeech Scribe is another matter. This software hasn't been updated in maybe a year. I bought it a year ago and it has a serious bug. Often Scribe will split spoken words down the middle as follows...

If you say, "Once upon a time COMMA there was a princess", Scribe may split this into 3 separate segments and then try to analyse them. So the transcription will come out like this...

Once upon a tie muh, there was a prin sess

...and because of the way the phrase editor works, it's really long winded to correct this text.

It's so bad in fact that I abandoned Scribe completely.

I have emailed Nuance about it, but the guy who replied seemed to be in denial that this bug existed. Yet 2 other people on the Nuance forum reported the same issue. And there was no response from a Nuance customer support person to their posts or mine either.

You can read my detailed review of MacSpeech Scribe here...

http://www.applemacenthusiast.com/uncategorized/macspeech-scribe-review-transcribe-audio-files-with-your-mac/

Dragon Dictate itself, even the latest version 2.5.1 has a number of silly bugs in it which make dictation harder than necessary: I'm a Brit. If I say "I now weigh 120 pounds" Dragon types out "I weigh £120". If I say: "I am not the first person to point out this bug in Scribe" Dragon types '1st person' with no option to choose 'first person'.

I think the reason bugs/issues like this exist is that Nuance's tech support team don't seem operate in the way other companies do. They don't seem to check their forum. They don't reply consistently to emailed issues. And I'm guessing that as a consequence customers aren't emailing them with the problems they are having. Any maybe tech support aren't relaying problem issues to the programmers.

I've posted my review of Dragon Dictate, with a list of a number of other bugs/inconsistencies, here...

http://www.applemacenthusiast.com/uncategorized/dragon-dictate-review-speech-recognition-from-nuance-for-mac/

October 20 2011 at 1:50 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
bidione

Only choice for SERIOUS professional dictation is DICTAMUS for iPhone. Tried a lot of other so called "dictation apps" - all of them are basically simple voice-notetaking apps that fall short of even the most basic functions you are used from conventional dictaphones (like rewing during dictation, insert etc.).

October 20 2011 at 12:42 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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