Best speech to text

I posted some speed+accuracy comparisons on this thread http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1516907

I use both Dragon Dictate for Mac v3 and Dragon NaturallySpeaking v12 running on Windows 7 in VMWare Fusion. Both work quite well. I don't really use the text editing commands but I do train them with my text documents for building its vocabulary.

I don't think there is any alternative to Dragon/Nuance for speech to text. The inbuilt dictation feature in OS X Mountain Lion requires a roundtrip to Apple's servers to work and I don't think it adapts to your voice over time. Has been unreliable for me.

 

Are you having bad results with the built in native (crippled Siri) dictation? If so Dragon may not be much (if any) better since Nuance powers Siri.

 

I believe the "training" is dynamic and accuracy increases with use. I also believe it's tied to the user account so if you have multiple people using the same account it may be less accurate. It's there, it's integrated and it's free so I would try it before spending money on other Apps. We may even see a full Siri version (knowing Apple probably limited to select [newer] Mac models) with 10.9.

 

Dragon Dictate is better than Mountain Lion dictation

That conclusion is incorrect.

Mountain Lion dictation (MLD) falls short of Dragon Dictate (DD) in many ways:

(1) It converts speech to text by communicating with Apple's servers which means it slower than DD which doesn't need an internet connection. If it's slow, you won't trust it with anything more than a sentence or two at a time.

(2) DD can be trained by reading passages, which helps it "understand" how you like to speak and does improve its accuracy. Moreover, you can feed it your text documents so it figures out word pairs & phrases you are likely to use together.

(3) DD has support for accents, which presumably does a better job than the generic voice model that MLD probably employs (since MLD doesn't have any customization options.)

Overall, DD is designed to improve its accuracy over time, if you help it along with vocabulary training and correcting the mistakes it makes. I'm not saying its perfect but it is surprisingly good. And when you see your words come out right, it's very addictive

 

"may not" is not a conclusion and leaves the door open for may be.

I also clearly stated in my next post.
"...It's there, it's integrated and it's free so I would try it [as in see if it works for you, OR NOT] before spending money on other Apps...."

 

Ok, I was hasty in my conclusion. I see your point about trying out the free version. Thing is, for me the free version sucks while DD impresses. Hence the caution in interpolating results from the inbuilt dictation feature (which is not even branded as Nuance technology) to the real thing. It is pretty bold/dumb to sell $200 software without a demo or trial period, but that's how Nuance wants to do this.

Also, there should be details of OS X 10.9 coming out next week at WWDC, which may have improved the dictation feature.

Jose
http://www.onekerato.com/ebooks.html