This is a quick demo of the 2 things that matter to me about Dragon dictation software. The text below the video are the actual words, as transcribed by Dragon, that you’ll hear me speak in the video (5 minutes).
The Transcription
“This is a quick demo of the two features that matter most to me in Dragon speech recognition software for the Mac. This demo is being made with version 6 professional.
The first feature is what most people think of when discussing dictation software: talking words onto the screen, exactly as you’re seeing me do now.
The accuracy is about 97%, which is about 9% better than the built-in feature on the Mac using the Siri engine. That’s 9% increased accuracy and it’s a big deal when it comes to editing, later.
You may have noticed that I’m talking a little differently than I would in casual conversation. That’s because I want the accuracy to be as high as possible. I don’t want to have to go back and edit mistakes that only happened because I didn’t clearly pronounce a word.
There are two other ways I speak differently in dictation than in casual conversations: I speak the punctuation and also some of the formatting, such as
In line breaks. Sometimes, I’ll even speak the syntax for markdown language, but let’s save that for another demo.
After a little practice, I found that speaking the punctuation, and some of the formatting, doesn’t interrupt my thought flow. In fact, it helps me think more clearly about the subject, helps me understand the context of what I was dictating, as well as eliminating most of the hassles of editing, later. The second Dragon feature that matters most to me is the ability to write anywhere.
#Writing Anywhere!
That’s right! Wherever I am I press the voice recorder icon on the iPhone and start talking. When done, I press “stop”, and then “save” buttons.
When I want the recorded files to be transcribed I send them to the Mac using airdrop and then drag and drop them onto the transcription window of Dragon. That gives me the capability to capture thoughts wherever, and whenever, they occur.
It’s not uncommon for me to dictate a few thousand words on the 20 minute ride home from dropping the kids off at school. How is that for not starting the writing day off with a blank page!
By the way, I only use the Dragon software for the Mac desktop. I don’t have the official Dragon software for the iPhone – called Dragon anywhere – the cost $15 a month. I don’t need it because I prefer to dictate onto the voice recorder app and batch transcribe all the Dragon files in the Dragon’s transcription window. Each file is transcribed to a separate text file as I’ll show you now.”