With regards to system requirements, VoiceSys is available as SaaS, Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android software. VoiceSys is transcription software, and includes features such as archiving & retention, audio file management, audio transmission, transcription reporting, voice capture, and voice recognition. VoiceSys offers a free trial.Dragon Dictate software delivers by far the best voice recognition in the industry. The reason the Dragon Dictate range of dictation software is our number one choice as the best dictation software for Mac is the amazing accuracy and sophistication it offers compared to any other dictation tool. Here are the necessary footnotes: Voice typing works best if there's not a lot. Smart displays, iOS 12.5.5 and Catalina security update, iPhone 13 problem with Apple Watch unlockingDictation Dictation is built into the Mac, just as it is on the latest.
![]() He has suggested several ways that Apple needs to improve macOS speech recognition to make it a viable alternative to Dragon Professional Individual: Some level of voice control of the Mac is also available via Dictation Commands, but again, it’s not as powerful as what was available from Dragon Professional Individual.TidBITS reader Todd Scheresky is a software engineer who relies on Dragon Professional Individual for his work because he’s a quadriplegic and has no use of his arms. The continuous speech-to-text software was widely considered to be the gold standard for speech recognition, and Nuance continues to develop and sell the Windows versions of Dragon Home, Dragon Professional Individual, and various profession-specific solutions.This move is a blow to professional users—such as doctors, lawyers, and law enforcement—who depended on Dragon for dictating to their Macs, but the community most significantly affected are those who can control their Macs only with their voices.What about Apple’s built-in accessibility solutions? macOS does support voice dictation, although my experience is that it’s not even as good as dictation in iOS, much less Dragon Professional Individual. #1577: iPhone 12/12 Pro repair program, fix corrupted Chrome extensions, iCloud Mail custom domains, Chipolo AirTag alternative, 10-digit dialing changesIn October 2018, Nuance announced that it has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac and will support it for only 90 days from activation in the US or 180 days in the rest of the world. Is there a recorder player for recordings for the macSupport for cursor positioning and mouse button events: Although Scheresky acknowledges that macOS’s Dictation Commands are pretty good and provide decent support for text cursor positioning, macOS has nothing like Nuance’s MouseGrid, which divides the screen into a 3-by-3 grid and enables the user to zoom in to a grid coordinate, then displaying another 3-by-3 grid to continue zooming. Also, Apple’s speech recognition isn’t continuous—it works for only a few minutes before stopping and needing to be reinvoked. But Scheresky believes it needs to become speaker-dependent, so it can learn from your corrections to improve recognition accuracy. Support for speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition: Currently, macOS’s speech recognition is speaker-independent, which means that it works pretty well for everyone. Scheresky isn’t asking Apple to provide such custom vocabularies, but he needs to be able to add custom words to the vocabulary to carry out his work. It’s also not clear how well they interface with current versions of macOS.Regardless, if Apple enhanced macOS’s voice recognition in the ways Scheresky suggests, it would become significantly more useful and would give users with physical limitations significantly more control over their Macs… and their lives. An expensive head-mounted pointing device, although the SmartNav is $600 and the HeadMouse Nano and TrackerPro are both about $1000. An off-the-shelf hack using Keyboard Maestro and Automator. Dedicated software, in the form of a $35 app called iTracker. There are some better alternatives for mouse pointer positioning: He talks about this in a video.Unfortunately, although Switch Control would let Scheresky control a Mac using a sip-and-puff switch or a head switch, such solutions would be both far slower than voice and a literal pain in the neck. From the day that MacSpeech sold transferred its product to Nuance I was concerned that this would eventually happen given their jaded history. Frankly I am not that unhappy to see them disappear, hopefully opening the door to a more user centric publisher of speech recognition for the Mac should Apple not enhance its current product to fill the gap. Such improvements will help both those who face physical challenges to using the Mac and those for whom dictation is a professional necessity.Throughout its history Nuance has been an unreliable, buggy, product with abismal technical support. Please enhance macOS speech recognition to support user-added custom words, speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition that learns from user corrections to improve accuracy, and cursor positioning and mouse button events.Thanks for encouraging Apple to bring macOS’s accessibility features up to the level necessary to provide an alternative to Dragon Professional Individual for Mac. Then Nuance purchased Mac Speech and their Mac product was reborn.But I agree, it is incumbent on Apple to fill the void now. Nuance abandoned the Mac version once before, and a company named Mac Speech filled the void for a few years. I’m not familiar with the name you use, Dragon Professional Individual. I was one of those suckers that did the update hoping for the best.So the question now arises, do existing users who opted for the last, very expensive update, that still never properly worked reliably and often crashed, have recourse against Nuance, given the product never consistenty functioned in a reliable fashion? I have no legal experience but could be grounds for a possible class action lawsuit?I would invite other readers to share their thoughts on these questions.As I’ve known it, Nuance’s product is called Dragon Dictate. It is no wonder that given its latest price point, many users probably decided to decline the update offer which likely provided their justification for abandoning the product. To my mind, the whole point of the Finder window sidebar is as an aid to navigation, and the loss of color was a serious blow to that objective. Nor is the developer interested in expanding his product, despite my requests that he do so. So I’ve had to get buy with Total Finder, which restores some of them, though by no means all. For some years there was a hack that could restore those colors and icons, but Apple killed that in El Capitan by abandoning the supporting technologies. Interestingly, in Safari, pictures and icons retain their true colors when the screen is reversed, which isn’t a bad thing.Meanwhile, a while back I pointed a client to the Mac’s dictation feature when he got tired of wrestling with Dragon Dictate, and paying for their upgrades. In my case, I reverse my screen, as now, so that I see white text on a black background, which is, for me, easier to read. Accessibility is clearly not one of their priorities, despite some other features that assist in that regard. His tolerance for mediocrity in quality control is monumental. Tim Cooke is a nice man, but he seems not to exercise sufficient control over the fading lights in Apple’s executive suites. Who knows when, if ever, they will wake up. As with many big, successful companies, their leadership is far removed from their user base, and hubris has set in. And he has use of his hands when he needs them, so some of the Mac’s limitations don’t bother him.Sad to say, Apple no longer caters to users, as they once did.
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