The built-in Mavericks OS X speech recognition is a good piece of Voice recognition software to give you a taste of what speech recognition is like, but not as good as Dragon Dictate. This is mainly due to the complete lack of any correction capability. Here’s how it compares to Dragon Naturally Speaking, and how to enable the ‘Enhanced Dictation’ Mode which makes it a lot faster. You may remember the launch of the first Macintosh in 1984. Steve Jobs said “today, for the first time ever, I’d like to let Macintosh speak for itself,” and the computer replies. “Hello, I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.” Then in the 1990’s we had ‘Plaintalk’ and ‘Macintalk’.
What is the best speech to text software to use? When you are using this basic Siri dictation, whether it’s on the Mac using the built-in dictation software or if it’s on the iOS device you will be dictating one or two sentences at a time.
These were attempts to make the Macintosh computer human. There was also ‘Speakable Items’ where you could dictate short commands to the Mac. In OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion) Apple introduced “dictation.” It was basically an OS X version of ‘SIRI’ where your speech would be sent off to a server to be recognised and the text would come back to your computer. In OS X 10.9 (Mavericks), for the first time, there is a usable speech recognition engine built-in to Mac OS X.
There was not a lot of fanfare about it. In fact it almost comes as a hidden feature. You need to turn it on by enabling a mode called ‘Enhanced Dictation’ in the System Preferences.
Despite this understated introduction, I think it’s one of the best things about OS X Mavericks. The only thing lacking from the built in Mavericks dictation is correction. If correction arrives in the next version of OS X, it will be a game changer.
The one major flaw: No correction. Mavericks Dictation would be to be very painful to use as a long term solution because there is no way of correcting mistakes and therefore helping it to learn. If there is a word it gets wrong, it will be getting it wrong forever. It works OK for me, but if it made any more mistakes that it did it would be un-usable without a correction and training feature.
One of the redeeming features of speech recognition software like Dragon Naturally Speaking (on the PC) and Dragon Dictate (on the Mac) is that even though it makes the occasional mistake, it has a correction feature. If you correct a word it will learn from this. The more mistakes you correct the better it gets. There are lots of articles comparing the accuracy of Dragon dictate with the built in OS X dictation. But most of these articles fail to address this important difference.
For example they state that the accuracy of Dragon Dictate is 96.6 percent and for Mavericks’s Dictation is 89.6 percent. But no mention that the Mavericks has no learning ability. They compare the speed of dictation between the two programs. Again, they miss the biggest difference. The biggest difference is not the accuracy or the speed. The biggest difference is the ability to learn.
Accuracy and speed can both improve as the software learns to adapt to your voice. This means that Dragon Dictate will continue to improve as you use it. The OS X built-in dictation will continue to be stuck with words it doesn’t understand. If you are thinking of speech recognition, the built in Maverick’s OS X speech recognition might be a good trial. If you like what you see, go and buy. If you don’t like it, stay away! Enabling the “Enhanced Dictation” By default the Dictation seems to be similar to SIRI based speech recognition.
It sends your speech over the Internet to Apple to be recognised. But the OS X dictate has an option to download the speech files and then recognise your speech locally like Dragon does.
To enable this you need to go into the System Preferences. Under “Dictation” there is a checkbox called “use enhanced dictation.” If you check this box it will download the speech files that you need. See it in action Unlike Dragon Dictate, there is no training involved.
The built in, untrained speech recognition does a reasonably good job. Look at this. Microphone If you are going to attempt to seriously use the built-in OS X dictation, I suggest you get yourself a good microphone. You really need a good headset microphone with some noise cancellation that is either Bluetooth or USB compatible. I suggest you check out. I got a great Samson wireless headset from them.
Conclusion The built-in Mavericks OS X speech recognition is in my opinion a good trail. It is almost as accurate as Dragon Dictate and will give you a feel for speech recognition provided (1) you have a good microphone and (2) you are expecting it to be a trial, not a viable long term speech recognition product. It Nuance’s Dragon engine is what powers SIRI. If that’s the case, if Apple add correction to their Dictation app then Nuance’s Dragon Dictate would become completely obsolete. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future with Apple’s Dictation.
My suggestion is to try out OSX Dictation (in Enhanced Mode), and if you like it, go and buy. I have recently purchased a MacBook Pro Retina (unbelievable graphics!!!) and decide to try Maverick’s Dictation. To say I was disappointed was an understatement! I found that the time taken to go back to find and fix the mistakes probably took longer than typing the text in by hand. The real annoying part is that I can not train it to prevent it from making the same mistakes over and over again.
In the past I have used Dragon Dictation in Windows. Okay, it took half an hour of reading to have the computer recognise my broad Australian drawl. Each time I used it I would correct the mistakes.
After a week or so I was down to one or two errors per page! Give me Dragon over Maverick’s any day. Reading how Apple strives for excellence, the concern I have is that in future editions of Maverick’s, Apple might include a “learning procedure”. If so all that money for Dragon might be wasted. Even still I think I will purchase a Mac version of Dragon and educate my MacBook Pro so it performs even better. I hope this was useful.
Regards Ross Macdonald. While I really do appreciate the time you spent comparing the different types of word recognition and I can see the benefits of both, I am really surprised that you, as a writer, would not take the time to grammar or spell-check your work. It seems that you’ve come to rely on the dictation software just a little too much. I won’t point out the several mistakes (and I’m talking about in the main article, not the text on the video thumbs), but if you even re-read it, I’m sure you’ll find them. I am one of those people who feels it’s important to preserve at least reasonable writing or it will go the way that the “educators” are taking cursive writing: out of the system–another mistake. In any case, enjoy your Samson! Yes has improved very much with accuracy.
It’s quite amazing out of the box. It seems pretty much on par with Siri and it seems more accurate than Dragon out of the box. But there is still no correction. So although it is better, it cannot learn by you telling it to correct your mistakes.
For example it will not recognise me saying “Yosemite” and there is no way for me to train it so I simply cannot dictate the word “Yosemite” to it. With dragon I can train it to words it doesn’t know and it learns them.
I have used dragon dictate for many years and found it to be really good. However, after upgrading to Mojave it no longer works in many applications, and when I tried to remedy this I found that they have decided to discontinue Dragon Dictate for mac. They did this 2 months almost to the day after taking $300 from me for the latest version. To say i am annoyed is an understatement. They had to have known it was about to be discontinued and still took my money.
Alas, for any serious typing tasks the mac built-in in dictation is absolutely useless, massively annoying in the way it can not decide when to start new sentences random capitalizations etc., and is actually very counter productive. Beyond simply commands it is utter pants. If there are alternatives to Dragon now that it has been pulled I am desperate to know about it.
Speech to text converter tool is used to convert any voice into plain text. Default language supported is English US.
It also supports the languages installed in your Windows 10 OS. This tool is simple and clean.
Instead of typing your email, story, class or conversation, you can just speak and this tool can convert it into text. You can copy this text and paste it wherever you need it. Its a UWP app which means works on Windows 10 device family like PC, tablet, phone, xbox. Important: Use high quality microphone. Suggest an external microphone for best performance. Needs internet connection. Needs Microphone Access How to: - Launch App - Give microphone permission - Click on Dictation - If any warning sign shown below to give permission for speech recognition then click on the link to goto settings to 'turn on know me' option.
Or Manually goto settings - speech,inking,typing - click on 'turn on speech services and typing suggestions' - turn on - Start speaking - App converts your speech to text instantly - Copy the text to your desired place If it doesn't work then follow instructions carefully. External Microphone,Microphone access, turning on speech services are important to make this app work and give better results.
Speech to text converter tool is used to convert any voice into plain text. Default language supported is English US.
It also supports the languages installed in your Windows 10 OS. This tool is simple and clean. Instead of typing your email, story, class or conversation, you can just speak and this tool can convert it into text. You can copy this text and paste it wherever you need it. Its a UWP app which means works on Windows 10 device family like PC, tablet, phone, xbox. Important: Use high quality microphone. Suggest an external microphone for best performance.
Needs internet connection. Needs Microphone Access How to: - Launch App - Give microphone permission - Click on Dictation - If any warning sign shown below to give permission for speech recognition then click on the link to goto settings to 'turn on know me' option. Or Manually goto settings - speech,inking,typing - click on 'turn on speech services and typing suggestions' - turn on - Start speaking - App converts your speech to text instantly - Copy the text to your desired place If it doesn't work then follow instructions carefully. External Microphone,Microphone access, turning on speech services are important to make this app work and give better results.