The 140-Character Verdict

Dragon® Home v15 speech recognition helps you get more done on your PC by voice. Dictate documents, send email, search the Web, and more. Designed using Nuance Deep Learning™ technology, it delivers up to 99% recognition accuracy, adapts to different accents, and even works in noisy environments. Simply speak and watch your words appear on the screen 3x. Dragon speech recognition software is better than ever. Speak and your words appear on the screen. Say commands and your computer obeys. Dragon is 3x faster than typing and it's 99% accurate. Master Dragon right out of the box and start. Just over a year ago, I reviewed Dragon Dictate 2.5, which was an incremental upgrade to version 2.0 of the program.Nuance has now released Dragon Dictate 3. ‎The most accurate professional-grade dictation service available on the market. Create templates, add custom words, and instantly dictate your documents – Dragon Anywhere will automatically adapt to how you speak. Download your one-week FREE TRIAL now! Trial converts to a monthly ($14.99) or annual.

Judged on its own merits, Dragon Dictate is awesome. Considering Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Dictate’s shortcomings are showstoppers.

Disclosure

It is cliche to begin reviews of speech recognition software by telling your audience that you are, in fact, using the speech recognition software in question. Let’s get that out of the way up front: I am composing this review using a copy of Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac that I purchased directly from Nuance Communications for $99. The price reflects a $100 discount off MSRP that was offered to existing Dragon customers.

I have been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for PC daily at my desk job and in my personal life since 2008. This review will not examine whether you should consider using speech recognition software as an alternative to typing. As far as I’m concerned, the answer is an emphatic yes. Nuance has sold me on speech recognition.

I’ve been typing for well over twenty years and despite lacking the dexterity to learn proper “home row” typing, I can type over 60 words per minute. I can dictate over 180 words per minute. Talking is simply faster than typing. Saying “send an e-mail to [recipient] copying [recipients]” is faster than opening an e-mail program and typing in the addresses.

I think that you should be talking to your computer already.

Hardware

Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac was reviewed on a 2012 MacBook Air with 8 GB of RAM and a 2.0 Ghz Ivy Bridge i7 processor. It’s worth noting that the i7 processor comes with more L3 cache than the i5 processor that comes standard in the 2012 MacBooks. Although the difference between the processors is negligible for most computing tasks, L3 cache is what drives the Dragon speech recognition engine. In other words, the more L3 cache you’ve got, the faster your words will be turned into text.

I tested the software using the following equipment:

KnowBrainer hands-free headset microphone
iPod touch (4th generation)
Samsung Galaxy SII smartphone
GN Netcom bluetooth headset
Andrea USB sound pod

Get the Pod, People!

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Nothing is going to affect your experience more with speech recognition software than you, personally. Having a good dictation style is much more important than having a $2,000 computer or a $300 microphone. A good dictation style can be learned with practice. Once you’ve got it, though, the best investment you can make in speech recognition is in an external sound card (aka “USB sound pod”).

External sound cards (which can be had for around $50) enable your speech to be processed away from your computer’s internal components (such as the fan and the processor) meaning that Dragon will have a clearer sound sample to work with. Giving Dragon a clearer sound sample means that it will be able to turn your words into text even faster.

Fast and Flawless

Dragon Dictate 3 is an unbelievably accurate dictation tool. Nuance claims 99% accuracy with this latest version, and after several weeks of testing I believe that to be true. In fact, Dragon Dictate 3 offers the best dictation experience I’ve ever had. Words are recognized instantly and appear on my screen as soon as I can speak them. To watch the words pour so effortlessly from my mouth to page is, even after more than four years of daily use, still awe-inspiring.

Nuance powers the Dictation capability that’s already built in to Macs running Mountain Lion and the iPad 3. The biggest difference between the two is that Dragon Dictate processes your speech on your local machine rather than sending your words to a server to be processed. Since the actual speech recognition is happening locally it happens much faster than using Mountain Lion’s dictation, where users have to pause and then wait around 10 seconds for their words to be returned. The speech recognition engine isn’t the most important thing Dragon Dictate 3 stores locally, though: Dragon Dictate 3 stores its own vocabulary so that you can add your own custom words, custom spellings, and custom shorthand to make your words appear to your exact specifications.

Dragon Dictate 3 transcribes speech better than any dictation product to date, including all previous versions of the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software on PC. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 introduced some changes to the way the software recognized speech that were designed to filter out background noise but instead created regular lags (between 30 seconds and two minutes) between when a user would speak and when the spoken utterance would be passed to the software for transcription. This latency made the software unusable for several longtime users, many of whom voluntarily downgraded to previous versions of the software. I am delighted to report that those issues are apparently resolved; Dragon Dictate 3 performs with no latency whatsoever.

Performance was equally impressive no matter which microphone I used. I prefer the KnowBrainer headset because it is inexpensive, portable, and it has open ears that allow me to listen for the telephone, my colleagues, or my favorite music while dictating. For those who prefer to be wireless, bluetooth is a viable option – although due to the nature of the way sound is transmitted via Bluetooth, you might find that Dragon has a hard time differentiating between similar sounds, particularly “s” and “f.”

A cheaper wireless option (with the same caveat as above) is to use the built-in microphone on your computer. This offers the ultimate in convenience and comfort. Be aware, however, that using this microphone is the only time where you’ll really have to be conscious of the noise around you while dictating. Nuance recommends that its users dictate in quiet environments. This is good (if impractical) advice that, thankfully, isn’t necessary as long as you’ve got a decent, noise-canceling microphone close to your mouth. The built-in microphones can’t practically be held close to your mouth, so it’s best to use that one behind closed doors with the television, Youtube, or your associates muted in the background.

App-etite for Dictation

You might already own a wireless microphone, just check your pockets and the App Store. Nuance has launched two exceptional apps to be used alongside Dragon Dictate 3. The first, called Dragon Remote Microphone, allows you to use your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch (4th gen or later) or Android smartphone as a wireless microphone. The second, called Dragon Recorder, will transcribe notes that you speak into it throughout your day.

A note on the Dragon Recorder app, before you get your hopes up: the technology here can only transcribe the voice of a single speaker — you. If you’re hoping to run the app, sit your iPhone on your meeting table, and fire your secretary because you’ll no longer need meeting minutes then you’ll be sorely disappointed. Dragon Recorder will do remarkably well transcribing your voice, but the voices of other participants will not be recognized.

It is possible for speech recognition technology to transcribe the voice of multiple speakers against a massive collection of data. This is what enables Siri, Dictation on Mountain Lion, and Nuance’s award-winning Dragon Dictation mobile app to work. But Nuance has chosen to enable the Dragon Recorder app to run against your personal Dictate profile. This is a deliberate trad

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