Review by Shevi

First, a little bit about me. I’m a writer, and although my spelling and typing are pretty good, I’ve been using Dragon Naturally Speaking Premium for the PC for years. It reads back what I wrote, which helps me catch typos and repeated words that my eyes alone might miss. Over the years, it’s gotten better and better.

My dyslexic husband, though, prefers to work on our Mac, and he prefers to have me handle his editing needs. After all, what’s the point of being married to a writer if you can’t have her check your spelling, grammar, punctuation, and general writing style? He has an iPhone, too, and I’ve seen him struggle with Siri, whose voice recognition capabilities are a joke compared to my Android’s. So I got this software for him, because… Well, I’m tired of doing something for him when he should be able to do it himself, with the help of a little software.

Dragon Dictate for the Mac is a lot better than Siri at recognizing his voice. There’s no question about that. But it doesn’t hold a candle to the latest version of Dragon Naturally Speaking Premium that I’m using on my PC. To be honest, part of it does seem to be, well, him. My husband just can’t seem to find a voice-recognition program that understands him. I mean, I tried Dragon Dictate, and it seemed to work okay, though not great. I’d say the accuracy with a good headset was about 92%. (By comparison, I’d give Siri a 40% and DNS Premium for the PC a 98%). For him, though, the accuracy was more like 75% with Dictate and maybe 80% with DNS Premium. Maybe it’s his English accent. Maybe it’s that he sort of starts and stops when he speaks. Maybe it’s that he doesn’t speak at an even level. I don’t know. So he’s decided to stick with his old system, meaning me. None of us want to be replaced by computers, but when it comes to some things… It would have been nice. I could have spent more time on my own writing.

So I like Dragon Dictate for the Mac. It’s head and shoulders above the competition when it comes to voice recognition for the Mac. But I don’t love it the way I love DNS Premium for the PC. It still has a way to go.