Review of Dragon For Macs: Speech to Text
Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
Darren Murph has written a clear and easy to understand review about Dragon Dictate 2.5 by Nuance for Macs, in this Engadget piece.
I occasionally use this software when I’m writing reports, and when I do I’m very satisfied. I’ve been tracking this speech recognition software (turning human speech into text on a screen) for a long time. Dragon is by most accounts the best there is and I’m glad it’s recently become available for Mac OS.
I still don’t recommend it for the under high school aged student unless they’re very good readers with the ability to slow down and enunciate a bit more clearly than most kids speak.
Go ahead and read this review. He teases it apart really well.
[via Richard Wanderman
Hi, I’m an AT trainer and I have had students in middle school really well with Dragon. It’s not even students that read well that do well with Dragon, it’s the kids that can organize their ideas and those that articulate well that do well with Dragon. I call them my “Dragon-kids”. Definitely a God-send for many students.
Mara, You’re right; Dragon isn’t for everyone and even for kids who have learned to read adequately, the cadence and particularly their speaking clarity is pretty key to getting good use out of Dragon.
And yes, it doesn’t do anything as far as helping over or through the hurdle of organizing language or paragraphs.
I like Dragon for my own professional use but don’t often recommend it for student use for any lengthy writing unless they have all the needed sub-skills.
What I do recommend is to use a Dragon App or another voice recognition for recording short bits of info, like homework assignments (unless you have Siri:).