Dragon Dictate 3

I’m trying out Dragon Dictate 3 for the Mac. Is it ready for primetime? You tell me:

One of the most impressive features of brains – especially human brains — is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way. Given apprentice the desire to impress his master and a chicken-16 past, and his brain devotes its massive resources to distinguishing males from females. Given unemployed aviation enthusiast a chance to be a national hero, and his brain learns to distinguish enemy aircraft from local fly boys. This flexibility in learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human intelligence. All many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves and they are so flexibly intelligent, fastening the neural circuits to match the task at hand. It is for this reason that we can colonize every region on the planet, learn the local language were born into, and master skills as diverse as playing the violin, high-jumping and operating spatial cockpits.

–David Eagleman, Incognito, p. 71, as heard by Dragon Dictate 3.0

and here’s what Dictate should have produced:

One of the most impressive features of brains – especially human brains — is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way. Give an apprentice the desire to impress his master and a chicken-sexing task, and his brain devotes its massive resources to distinguishing males from females. Give an unemployed aviation enthusiast a chance to be a national hero, and his brain learns to distinguish enemy aircraft from local flyboys. This flexibility of learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human intelligence. While many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly intelligent, fashioning their neural circuits to match the task at hand. It is for this reason that we can colonize every region on the planet, learn the local language we’re born into, and master skills as diverse as playing the violin, high-jumping and operating space shuttle cockpits.

–David Eagleman, Incognito, p. 71

Bottom line: you can’t just dictate. You have to watch what Dragon is “typing”, and be on the lookout to correct it; and you have to be a pretty bad typist or have nasty RSI to put up with its constant mistakes. Unlike my typing Dragon doesn’t misspell words. However, my typing rarely adds a word I didn’t want to be there. It’s easier to correct a misspelling than a misrecognized but correctly spelled word. If you can type, you’ll prefer typing to dictating.

2 Responses to “Dragon Dictate 3”

  1. Stefan Tilkov Says:

    I’ve had the same experience in the past, but have to admit I never bothered to spent a significant amount of time with any dictation solution. Did you, i.e. did you properly “train” the system? I’m left wondering whether that would change anything.

  2. Elliotte Rusty Harold Says:

    I’ve done the basic training and some extra. Perhaps more would help. What’s not obvious to me is whether it learns adaptively; that is, as I correct previous misspellings. A big problem with previous versions was that Dragon could not reliably select the words and phrases that needed to be corrected when they were spoken. That made training it almost impossible. I should experiment more with this version.

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