

To set it up, you create a new “profile” (voice file), just as you would if you were setting up Dictate for use by a different family member. Or anyone online trying to settle a point about what Politician X did or didn’t say.
#DRAGON SPEAKS FOR MAC TV#
This feature, if it works, would be a big, big deal for TV editors and producers.

Every time I review dictation software, about 50 people write to ask, “Does that mean it can make transcriptions of recorded interviews now?” Until now, the answer has always been no. In other words, you can feed it an MP3 file of a speech, a college lecture, or even an interview, and Dragon Dictate will turn it into typed text.įor a lot of people, that’s the Holy Grail. At least for this moment in marketing time, the Mac version offers a huge new feature that the Windows version doesn’t have: It can transcribe the audio recordings of total strangers. There are many other examples where the Windows version offers more, or better, features than the Mac version.
#DRAGON SPEAKS FOR MAC FULL#
Dragon Dictate 4 includes a plug-in that gives you Full Text Control there. It’s not in any email programs, unless you happen to use Gmail on its website. On the Mac, the list is much shorter: Notepad, TextEdit, Microsoft Word 2011, and Pages 4.3. In Windows, you get Full Text Control in all kinds of programs: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Outlook, Word, Notepad, WordPad, OpenOffice Writer, WordPerfect, and Excel.
#DRAGON SPEAKS FOR MAC SOFTWARE#
Unfortunately, if you’ve clicked elsewhere since you typed, forget it you’ve interrupted the river, and the dictation software no longer has any idea where it is in your document. If you now fix the error and say “Go back,” then the software walks the insertion point forward again to the point where you’d stopped. It thinks of your text as a continuous river, and the only way it can get back upstream is to swim there. In a program that doesn’t offer Full Text Control, if you say, “Select ‘four score and seven years ago,’ ” the speech software visibly walks the insertion point back through all the text until it reaches that spot, as though you were pressing the left-arrow key over and over. That’s Full Text Control: The dictation software can “read” and jump around in your document just as easily as you can. In programs that offer Full Text Control, like Microsoft Word, you can say, “Select ‘four score and seven years ago.’ ” The Dragon software instantly highlights that phrase, several paragraphs back. Suppose you’re typing (that is, speaking) along, and you want to change something you said two paragraphs earlier. It’ll take some explanation stay with me here. Here’s an example: a feature called Full Text Control. Unfortunately, the Mac version, Dragon Dictate, is not as mature or as polished as the Windows version.
