Hi,
i am not a computer genius so maybe this affects my view.
best for mac:
dictate
best for windows pc
dragon naturally speaking
I have tried them all, viavoice for mac (awful), ilisten (awful) and then with the intro of boot camp, i set aside initially an insufficient amount of space 20gb and had to redo the whole thing later with 30 gb from memory. I had to buy vista and download a free anti-virus, which was my welcome back to windows. then i installed and dragon 9 preferred worked a treat. it learns easily and gets better. i updated to 10 and had some problems but it worked.
then they introduced dictate so i got it and it just cannot learn some words so much so that i spent about 2 days trying to use it, i got onto utube watched the videos and no good. I fell behind in my output and went back to boot camp/vista/dns. maybe the headset is no go good, though it works fine with dns. i intend to revisit it and see if i can get to work any better.
now i have vmware fusion/vista/dns and it works but it works slow. that is, the words come up on the screeen about 5 seconds after you have spoken them.
if you have a look at the reviews in cnet for dns you will see some unhappy chappy's in there also but i think dns is the best and most intuitive if you had to toss up between dictate and dns.
now macspeach have just released "Scribe" which is interesting. i just cannot get my head around dictate not just being updated to include the features of scribe instead a whole new app has been created - i dont get it. i have emailed macspeach as the offer is $70 off retail for scribe and will post their answer when and if they get back to me.
having said all the above, spinningcompass is real satisfied with dictate. maybe i am doing something wrong. or maybe i would have been better if i never had to switch from dns to dictate. i dont like windows and i dont like having it on my computer so i really want dictate to work.