The built-in Mavericks OS X speech recognition is a good piece of Voice recognition software to give you a taste of what speech recognition is like, but not as good as Dragon Dictate. This is mainly due to the complete lack of any correction capability. Here’s how it compares to Dragon Naturally Speaking, and how to enable the ‘Enhanced Dictation’ Mode which makes it a lot faster.

You may remember the launch of the first Macintosh in 1984. Steve Jobs said “today, for the first time ever, I’d like to let Macintosh speak for itself,” and the computer replies. “Hello, I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.” Then in the 1990’s we had ‘Plaintalk’ and ‘Macintalk’. These were attempts to make the Macintosh computer human.

You're free to dictate documents and speak commands directly into your Mac without using a headset for optimal flexibility and convenience. Share dictation and sync customizations with the Dragon Anywhere mobile solution to continue documentation work anywhere you go. Dragon Express Mac App – The Next Best Thing To A Free Trial Of Dragon Dictate for Mac By Dave On November 24, 2011 5 Comments One of the most common searches that end up with visitors landing on my blog is people looking for a trial version of Dragon Dictate for the Mac.

Same goes for right clicking on a function or class to go to the definition. There are also the strange inconsistencies like if I am creating a site using html + asp.net sometimes the site will open fine, other times it won't, even if the code has never changed (I already ruled out a computer issue since it happens with the same project on multiple machines). This rarely works (even after a brand new reimage). Programing software for mac.

There was also ‘Speakable Items’ where you could dictate short commands to the Mac. In OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion) Apple introduced “dictation.” It was basically an OS X version of ‘SIRI’ where your speech would be sent off to a server to be recognised and the text would come back to your computer. In OS X 10.9 (Mavericks), for the first time, there is a usable speech recognition engine built-in to Mac OS X. There was not a lot of fanfare about it. In fact it almost comes as a hidden feature. You need to turn it on by enabling a mode called ‘Enhanced Dictation’ in the System Preferences. Despite this understated introduction, I think it’s one of the best things about OS X Mavericks.

The only thing lacking from the built in Mavericks dictation is correction. If correction arrives in the next version of OS X, it will be a game changer. The one major flaw: No correction. Mavericks Dictation would be to be very painful to use as a long term solution because there is no way of correcting mistakes and therefore helping it to learn. If there is a word it gets wrong, it will be getting it wrong forever.

It works OK for me, but if it made any more mistakes that it did it would be un-usable without a correction and training feature. One of the redeeming features of speech recognition software like Dragon Naturally Speaking (on the PC) and Dragon Dictate (on the Mac) is that even though it makes the occasional mistake, it has a correction feature. If you correct a word it will learn from this.

The more mistakes you correct the better it gets. There are lots of articles comparing the accuracy of Dragon dictate with the built in OS X dictation. But most of these articles fail to address this important difference. For example they state that the accuracy of Dragon Dictate is 96.6 percent and for Mavericks’s Dictation is 89.6 percent.

But no mention that the Mavericks has no learning ability. They compare the speed of dictation between the two programs. Again, they miss the biggest difference. The biggest difference is not the accuracy or the speed. The biggest difference is the ability to learn. Accuracy and speed can both improve as the software learns to adapt to your voice. This means that Dragon Dictate will continue to improve as you use it.