The Beginner's Guide to Dictation Software: The Best Apps for Voice to Text Productivity. Emily Esposito / June 2, 2017. Excel replace return character. So we tested free, built-in speech recognition software and paid apps on desktop and mobile to see which ones were best at comprehension, accuracy, and ease of use. Free with a Mac, iPhone, or iPad. ![]() One of the most common searches that end up with visitors landing on my blog is people looking for a trial version of. Good idea, it is quite a hefty purchase price (AU$180+) for some software that most know little about and therefore the cost vs risk factor is high. A trial version would be a good lead into the software and would allow people to have a play, see how accurate it is and become more comfortable before committing to a purchase. Great idea but alas a free trial version is not available. Firefox version 52 esr for mac java. As a compromise Nuance have just released to the Mac App Store Dragon Express for a cut down, yet still significant price of $US49.99 (AU$51.99). This app is an excellent introduction into voice recognition on the Mac and is essentially a cut down version of – Nuance’s flagship speech recognition product for the Mac. So how does it work? Similar to Dragon Dictate you will need to train your voice in Dragon Express, this creates your personal profile and allows the Dragon speech recognition engine to understand the way you speak. This task takes only two minutes and involves reading some pre-defined text so the app can listen to how you speak. (Note: if you decide to upgrade to Dragon Dictate your trained Dragon Express voice profile will not be compatible with Dragon Dictate, you will have to train a new voice profile, but hey only takes 5 minutes in Dragon Dictate). Nuance claim that the in-built mic in your Mac can be used but from years of experience a good quality noise cancelling USB headset and mic will give you better results, no support for the iPhone app. Already reading some of the App Store reviews there are alot of negative comments, most based around accuracy, I would be willing to bet a couple of dollars that is because of using the in built mic. Good quality speech recognition relies on good quality audio input with minimal or no background noise. Dragon Express also differs from the fully fledged Dragon Dictate version in that you can only dictate into the Dragon Express window, here you will see your words transcribed into text. From the Dragon Express window you can then post or route the transcribed text to any active app – so for example into TextEdit, twitter, Facebook, Google+, email or a Word or Pages document. If you are interested in giving speech recognition a try then this is an excellent and cost effective way to see what it is all about. Not quite a free trial but a good general overview of the Dragon speech recognition technology and the great work Nuance are doing in the Apple space. I would like to see a discount off Dragon Dictate 2.5 if you have Dragon Express installed but until Dragon Dictate appears in the Mac App Store this is a tricky one to manage and therefore isn’t yet available.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |