Several years ago, I bought an early version of Dragon Naturally Speaking for a Windows machine. There was nothing I could find for my beloved Mac. I finally threw Dragon Naturally Speaking away. I thought it was a work in progress, but not a real contributor to my work product. Now, I use VMware and Windows 7 on my Mac for Windows apps, but 95% of my work is done on the Mac OS.
One of the things I do is record an extemporaneous speech not to exceed 30 minutes using a pair of Sony digital recorders with microphones clipped to my tie. The pair provide redundancy in case one recorder should fail. The digital recordings are crystal clear. Later, one of the recordings is manually transcribed to a text file. From time to time, I wonder if today's Nuance products for either PC or Mac could convert the speech to text in an easy to use, accurate way. The speeches do not contain any directions for punctuation or formatting, but that is not a problem. That can be handled after the text is available on a word processing document. Given my prior experience and the enormous waste of time it was, I'm leery of trying it again with a "new, improved version." I see that Nuance offers version 12 of Dragon Naturally Speaking for the PC and MacSpeech Scribe for the Mac. It appears that one of these products might get the job done.
Is anyone familiar with the current performance status of these items? Have they truly become useful, productive, and easy to use? The Sony recorders are not mandatory in my case. Mine are several years old and they are strictly for the PC with Sony software, but I see that the iPhone App Store offers Dragon Recorder as a way to feed a recording to either Dragon Naturally Speaking on the PC or MacSpeech Scribe on the Mac. I would hope for a remote mic that I could clip to my tie since holding an iPhone up to my mouth during the talk would be absurd.
Last edited by JoBoy; 08/07/12 07:29 PM.
