OS X Mountain Lion may come with its own voice dictation capabilities, but Nuance is doing its part to stay ahead of the game with the release of Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac. The company announced the latest version of its Mac software on Wednesday, still priced at $199 for a physical box. It comes with plenty of new features in addition to tweaks to improve accuracy and speed. Not only can Dictate 3 now control your computer and accept long voice-based dictations without an Internet connection, it can also transcribe audio files for you, too.
According to Nuance, Dictate 3 "inherits the accuracy boost" that came with the core technologies applied to Dragon 12 for Windows. The company says Mac users can expect to see a 15 percent accuracy boost over Dictate 2.5 right out of the box—a number that could go up once you train the software to your user profile. The company has also added Smart Format Rules, which allows users to customize their use of abbreviations, numbers, and other formatting so that the dictated text comes out the way you want it to in the future. New in Dragon 3 is the ability to correct errors using speech as well, and the company says it's offering a wider range of alternative word choices when it comes to making corrections that the software will remember for future use cases.
The most significant new feature is the software's newfound ability to transcribe recorded audio files into text form. Nuance did (and still does) offer a separate product called MacSpeech Scribe that comes with similar features, but according to Nuance's Chief Marketing Officer Peter Mahoney, the two products address different types of user needs. "Scribe has a different use case—it allows you to create different profiles for audio so it can transcribe the voices of different people," Mahoney told Ars. "[Dragon Dictate] is a subset of Scribe, designed for your voice based on your user profile. It allows you to create a special version of the profile that understands recorded audio, and it'll transcribe your audio from there."
So, while Dictate 3 may not be the best tool to transcribe a recorded interview with another person, it seems appropriate for more personal tasks, like putting your own recorded voice notes into an easily readable format. Considering the price of the software is remaining the same despite the addition of several new features, it's hard to complain about limitations on multi-person transcriptions.
There are some other new features as well, such as support for 16kHz wide-band Bluetooth instead of the previous 8kHz audio. Mahoney pointed out that a "meaningful percentage of users" use a Bluetooth headset with Dragon already—he knows this because many of them buy their Bluetooth headsets through Nuance itself—and the upgraded Bluetooth will allow the software to make use of a higher quality audio signal. For those who are new to the software, Dragon Dictate 3 now comes with interactive tutorials to help get people started on the right foot, complete with actual lessons (not just a help menu item).
The advantages that Dragon offers over Mountain Lion's built-in dictation software aren't trivial, either. Mountain Lion's version depends on an Internet connection to do its voice-to-text processing on Apple's servers, while Dragon runs locally on your Mac with or without an Internet connection. Dragon also allows you to control your Mac using your voice—you can open and switch between applications easily without touching a mouse or trackpad—while Mountain Lion only allows you to enter content into designated text-entry areas.
Along with the Dictate 3 announcement, Nuance introduced its Android app to complement the company's already existing iOS offerings. Nuance says you can use the apps to act as a microphone for Dictate 3 on your Mac, or simply use them to record notes to be transcribed by the software later.
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