New MacBook User - voice to text

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Sorry, I just realized I posted this in the wrong forum. Never mind :)
 
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Voice to text for word

Hi, everyone! Newbie to the forum, fairly new Mac user. Always been a pc gal until January this year.

So still learning lots of things about the MAC platform, but there is one thing I could really use help with.

I am a writer and recently developed tendonitis in my hand. So I am looking for a voice to text program for word. Everything I have found has been really pricey, so I am hoping you guys might have some recommendations regarding free-ware or trial downloads for programs I could try out. Basically I want to speak my writing into a mic and have it transcribed automatically into word.

Thank you in advance for any help!!
:Cool:
 

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Merged threads.
 

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I am not aware of any free speech to text programs for the Mac. I am currently using Nuance - Dragon Dictate for Mac - Dragon Dictate speech recognition for the Mac and like it. It's not exactly cheap though $130 - $150 US online). There was a program called iListen available at one time but I think they were bought by Nuance and to be honest the current version of dictate is better than iListen IMO.
 
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I am not aware of any free speech to text programs for the Mac. I am currently using Nuance - Dragon Dictate for Mac - Dragon Dictate speech recognition for the Mac and like it. It's not exactly cheap though $130 - $150 US online). There was a program called iListen available at one time but I think they were bought by Nuance and to be honest the current version of dictate is better than iListen IMO.

Hi thank you for responding!! Is it pretty user friendly? How accurate is it at typing what you speak?
 

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It seems to be pretty easy to use for me. I am not using it as much as I could since my wife and I share the same computer room. The talking distracts her a bit.

I upgraded to the current version recently and am in the middle of creating/updating my voice profile. I accidentally created the last one based upon my MB Pro internal mic.

I was getting around 90% accuracy with the previous version. The newer version is using some different parameters in the recognition engine and according to them is supposed to work better but I don't have hard data on that yet. Will post bak when I run some tests.

As a consequence of the new engine they are not saying much about supporting wireless/BT at the moment--supposedly because some of them don't work well with the new base frequency setup. There is a workaround for that though.
 
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It seems to be pretty easy to use for me. I am not using it as much as I could since my wife and I share the same computer room. The talking distracts her a bit.

I upgraded to the current version recently and am in the middle of creating/updating my voice profile. I accidentally created the last one based upon my MB Pro internal mic.

I was getting around 90% accuracy with the previous version. The newer version is using some different parameters in the recognition engine and according to them is supposed to work better but I don't have hard data on that yet. Will post bak when I run some tests.

As a consequence of the new engine they are not saying much about supporting wireless/BT at the moment--supposedly because some of them don't work well with the new base frequency setup. There is a workaround for that though.
Thanks again for the fast response!! I looked on their site and I don't see where there is an option for a trial download. :\ Do you know if there is one?
 

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I don't believe there is a free trial. I did not see one when I was on their site about two weeks ago.

While googling to see if a trial was available I saw a post reminding me that Nuance has a full refund policy in the first 30 days if you are not satisfied. I checked the site and that appears to still be in effect. When you click the buy link the next page states:

"Give it a try - without risk! You'll see a boost in productivity from the moment you start using any of our Nuance products - that's our promise. Try it without risk for one full month. If you're not completely satisfied simply return it within 30 days of your purchase and we'll refund the complete purchase price." (emphasis mine).
 

Slydude

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I was going to post this in as an edit to the post above but it was becoming a wall of text.

There is a website called ATMac: Empowering Disabled Apple Users which has quite a bit of Mac-related accessibility information. Perhaps they will have some information that will be useful. Here's their review of the Mac version of Dictate. Dragon Dictate 2.0 Review
 
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Posting to update- I purchased Dragon Dictate and it is a fabulous program. I didn't think you prior for your awesome suggestions, so wanted to make sure I gave you a thumbs up! :)
 

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Glad you found that helpful. I have not been using the program much lately. My wife and I share the computer room and she finds the constant talking distracting. They do seem to have improved the program quite a bit though.
 
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Aren't there rumours that Siri is coming to the Mac soon? If you could wait, that would be free.
 

Slydude

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That may be true but then again rumors have been wrong on numerous occasions. If that day comes I suspect that Siri will be fine for shorter things such as e-mail posts but not so good for those who use speech recognition as the primary method of input.

There have already been some comparisons of the builtin OS X dictation features to Dragon Dictate. I suspect that a comparison of any upcoming version of Siri would be similar.
 

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