It's hard to keep up with every development in speech recognition, so I would appreciate if somebody could recap the current state of affairs of speech recognition software for the Macintosh.

The Mac user I will be working with is primarily interested in speech recognition for writing and editing academic articles. The NaturallySpeaking features that are most important include:

1. The ability to adapt the acoustic model to a nonstandard accent. (She speaks fluent English, but with an Israeli accent.)
2. The ability to import and export word/phrase lists.
3. The ability of the program to analyze a writing sample, and tweak the language model based on that analysis.
4. Insert after/before XYZ commands.
5. Select XYZ through XYZ commands.

I think the best program for the Macintosh is DragonDictate. Also, what some people do is use a virtual machine (a piece of software that makes your computer act like it is a completely different machine. To run Dragon NaturallySpeaking on the Macintosh.

The virtual machine concept can be a little bit difficult to grasp. You might want to try looking it up on YouTube or Google. I'm sure other people on this forum can explain it more fluently than I can.

Alan,

I know that Dragon Dictate 2 or 2.5 for Mac can do numbers 2 and 3 on your list. I can't confirm the other items on your list - and I'm not getting any useful clues from the Dragon Dictate official documentation. I'll be getting a Mac soon to do some testing of my own, but until then my best guess is that everything on your list is possible. Dragon Dictate for Mac's speech engine and dictation capability are very, very similar to that found in NaturallySpeaking 11.

Wheels raises another viable option. Windows runs very, very well on Intel Macs. Dragon NaturallySpeaking works well on a virtual machine, or on a separate Windows partition. 

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Eric Wright At work: DNS 12 Pro. At home: DNS 11.5 Pro,  KnowBrainer 2011, and Utter Command by RedStart Systems; Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac

 

Appetite for Dictation - My Blog

The new KnowBrainer Speech Recognition Forum, which is hopefully going live tomorrow, will be including a new Mac support forum.

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So it definitely does have an add words from lists??????

I know it has an add words from documents, but add word lists??? I can't find anything in the Dragon Dictate online manual about it.

If so does it use the same formatting as DNS?? ie the spoken forms etc. 

My own $.02 worth is that Dragon Dictate (Mac) is a poor cousin of Dragon Naturally Speaking (PC). Since I am a confirmed "Mac" guy, I run DNS in a Windows 7 virtual machine under either Parallels or VMWare Fusion.

So Nuance chummed the water, and I bit. They're offering Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac to their newsletter subscribers for $99. I opted for the download (after waiting for a Nuance chat support person who immediately left in favor of a Product Specialist who requested my phone number and called me... from the chat window... because that's what a guy wants when he does tech support chats), and have the distinct pleasure of paying $7 for "Extended Download Access" so that I can re-download the software that I legitimately purchased from the vendor. Anyway. Rant over, details to follow.

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Eric Wright At work: DNS 12 Pro. At home: DNS 11.5 Pro,  KnowBrainer 2011, and Utter Command by RedStart Systems; Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac

 

Appetite for Dictation - My Blog