So, how's dictation on Mountain Lion?

Awful.

I'm English with no accent and a clear speaking voice and it misunderstands 40% of my text.

iFanboy said:

Well that's disappointing

Does it work with Office for Mac?

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Yes, it works in any application where you enter text.

From my experience, the dictation has been VERY spot on and fast too. Almost how Siri should be on the iPhone. When I use dictation on the iPhone, it takes forever, and is often inaccurate.

Works pretty good for me. Not perfectly accurate, but pretty darn close, and I tend to slur my speech a little bit. We know the backbone of the tech is Dragon's Nuance. As we know from Dragon, their software gets better and more accurate with increased usage, so given Apple's massive database of users, Dictation and Siri are just going to continue to improve considerably. That's why it requires the online mode right now, so they can keep aggregating more info and improving the results. Maybe in a few years we will not longer require the online mode since it'll have achieved its accuracy goals.

This is why Siri and Dictation are beta, since it isn't perfect yet.

Daniel97 said:

Awful.

I'm English with no accent and a clear speaking voice and it misunderstands 40% of my text.

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There's no such thing as "no accent."

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iFanboy said:

How is it for dictating long chunks of text, like a letter? Can you just tap the FN key twice and start talking, saying words like "paragraph" and commanding bold, italics etc..?

Or is it literally for single blocks of text, without formatting?

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You can do that. It's kind of irritating to say "Period space space" to begin every sentence, though.

On the whole, I'm far more impressed with the newer text-to-speech features than the speech-to-text features. If I discover a great long article but have to do other work, or have to leave soon, I can just highlight all the text, right-click, and I have the option to send it to iTunes as a spoken track, sync it to my phone and go.

It's alright.

Does not like me saying "EH" that much though flips out and I get no text. some times it spits out HEY, instead of EH. wtf. no I said EH....


Technology and canadiens don't mix!

To show you the effectiveness of the voice dictation on with an American voice, I decided to make this post exclusively with the feature. Now, it isn't entirely perfect, and I'm sure there'll be plenty of mistakes. I made an appointment to include punctuation in my speech. The voice dictation seems to like to turn off after certain amount of time. Probably so the reaction can be just as fast. If it were to go on too long, I suspect the servers or get overloaded. Well not, not overloaded. What I mean to say it would be a little bit too long for the response of people wouldn't be happy.

In that in hindsight should've a little video with this feature. It would've been the ultimate source of proof that I'm not using any typing to do this. But I guess you just have to take my word for it this time.

I can see if you mistakes, now that the paragraphs are popping out. But, they're very easily fixed. With a little bit of typo fixing. If this feature gets used one more, will people even be making typos anymore. But will they call the mistakes that are made?

i think the dictation is very nice and useful in the german language. i did a long text some days ago and it was almost "mistake-free".

when the dication thinks it did something wrong, it will underline the word and you will be able to correct the word if you want afterwards

for me the dictation is one of the best new features of ML ...

Dictation is REALLY good! Yes it still makes its faults at times but its really accurate, and Im really surprised on how good it is. But yeah Dictation is one of my favorite features in OS X ML

Looking forward to this feature. I have Dragon Dictate and it gets better with use although hardly perfect. Any comparison....?

Works good for me. It understands probably 95% of what I say.

Works very well for me, with surprisingly few mistakes. I have to say I'm impressed so far.

im on ML GM and I just did a dictation test and it kinda froze. but what was really interesting was that when i went to force quit, this came up as the application that was stalled

Wow, could it be that Siri will eventually make its way into os x? I sure hope so!

212rikanmofo said:

Wow, could it be that Siri will eventually make its way into os x? I sure hope so!

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me too

212rikanmofo said:

Wow, could it be that Siri will eventually make its way into os x? I sure hope so!

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So do I. The iPad (i think second gen and the current) is going to get Siri so I'd think we will see macs next, maybe next year.

Revolverkiller said:

im on ML GM and I just did a dictation test and it kinda froze. but what was really interesting was that when i went to force quit, this came up as the application that was stalled Image

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Oh wow, I crashed it a few minuits ago and was just about to post this. Legit,
LOL

I was excited for this feature, but I wish it worked locally on the machine rather than through Apple's servers. To be honest, I would trust Google more with recordings of my voice than Apple just because Google has been vetted by the public and media for privacy concerns for so long, and Google's privacy policy is more explicit than Apple's when it comes to what each company does with data. Apple is very vague on what it can do with these recordings.

Plus, I've had experiences with MobileMe in the past where I've had e-mail issues, and I'll be chatting with their outsourced support and they've asked me if I see a certain e-mail in my inbox, letting me know that person is seeing the contents of my inbox. It was kind of surprising, at least at the time.

I'll probably use dictation, but not for personal journaling, which I use my Mac for pretty extensively.

Yeah! That is really freaky that the recordings are all sent to their server. I have done a little search trying to find out Apple's policy on these recordings if they have the right to keep them on record, but I haven't found anything. If someone finds something, please share!

Has anyone seen Person of Interest? This kind of reminds me of "the machine". Even Cloud Computing kind of scares me. Right now it is mostly media that is stored on the cloud, but lots of people in the industry seem to think that the future of cloud computing will have almost all computer storage in the cloud and computers will have minimal HD storage. (just do a google search for "future of cloud computing" and plenty of articles will say this is the trend)

I can't even begin to imagine when some malicious hackers crack into the "clouds", or when the government deploys laws that make the cloud virtually transparent to them. Big Brother will be watching, that's for sure!


But at the same time, Stephen Hawking has said, "And if governments are involved in the covers up [of aliens] , they are doing a much better job of it than they seem to do at anything else." The same can probably be said about the likelihood of a future "machine" as well, but we never can be too sure.

Meyvn said:

You can do that. It's kind of irritating to say "Period space space" to begin every sentence, though.

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Stop using two spaces after a period. It's a habit you probably learned in school, but it's wrong, and they shouldn't have been teaching you this. Only if you used typewriters was this of any benefit.

I know it will blow your mind, but really... Don't use two spaces. It's very wrong.

Matthew Yohe said:

Stop using two spaces after a period. It's a habit you probably learned in school, but it's wrong, and they shouldn't have been teaching you this. Only if you used typewriters was this of any benefit.

I know it will blow your mind, but really... Don't use two spaces. It's very wrong.

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I actually picked that up from two spaces to automatically add a period and capitalize from my iPhone or iPad. Otherwise, it is actually correct to use one space. Some software (like at least vB 4.0) condenses two spaces to one.

I've found dictation to be faster, and more reliable, then Siri on my iPhone.

swingerofbirch said:

I was excited for this feature, but I wish it worked locally on the machine rather than through Apple's servers. To be honest, I would trust Google more with recordings of my voice than Apple just because Google has been vetted by the public and media for privacy concerns for so long, and Google's privacy policy is more explicit than Apple's when it comes to what each company does with data. Apple is very vague on what it can do with these recordings.

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Really? You'd feel more secure giving your information to an advertising company--Google's main source of income is advertisement--then Apple, a company that makes its money off of hardware sales? I don't follow the logic, but okay. To each his own.

Also, I'd add that the reason that Google seems to be constantly vetted is because their slogan, Don't Be Evil, is complete lip-service. A good rule-of-thumb to follow: if you're not paying for a product, you are the product.