Dragon Express – A new dictation software for OS X

On the heels of the successes of Siri on the iPhone 4S, Nuance the company behind the speech to text software that is used for Siri, have brought out an express version of Dragon Dictate called Dragon Express. Here is a Dragon Express review based upon my own use of Dragon Dictate for Mac
for the last three or four months.

Dragon Express speech recognition

Dragon Express hits the Mac App Store

So it is with interest that I see that Nuance have brought out a product available for sale in the Mac App Store, which is a quarter of the recommended retail price of the Dragon Dictate software, that I bought. By the way I didn’t pay full retail price, because I was able to get a large discount by buying it from Amazon. The Dragon Dictate is still about two and a half times more expensive than this Dragon Express, that is now available.

Just the same as with the full product there is a voice training that should be completed along with a brief microphone setup. Also just the same, is the fact that it works better if you use a USB microphone, and better still if it is a headset microphone. All of us have words that are unique to ourselves and what we do, you can add custom words to Dragon Express same as with Dragon Dictate speech recognition software.

Use Dragon Express with other Mac applications

There are occasions when I use Dragon Dictate within a web browser or within Scrivener and I have found that, more than half the time it does not work correctly. It still recognises the words, I can see that by the recognition window which tells me what it was it thinks I said. But in the application I usually see that there are letters missing from the text that has arrived in the application. Usually it is just one letter, the last time I did it and it messed up like this, it just did not put the letter R in any of the words where there should have been one. Other occasions it has been a different letter that has been missing. It is because of this problem that I do tend to use the Dragon Dictate window to actually create the text from my speech. In that window I never have that problem. I will then do a copy and paste of that text into the application where I do actually want to use that text.

Dragon Dictate speech to text

Due to the fact that I already have Dragon Dictate for Mac
, the full version, I will not be buying this Dragon Express so will be interested to see how this works out in the Dragon Express version. In the advertising for the software it does claim that it can be used in other applications such as Mail, Facebook, Twitter and so on.

Your Opinions on Dragon Express Please

Therefore I will be very interested to hear your opinions if you buy the software to try out for yourself. Before you buy this application from the Mac App Store I would recommend that you read the reports that users who’ve already bought it, have put into the customer review area. The first three reviews that I have seen, said that the app will not load and the Nuance website has no support for it. The user that has tried Dragon Express says that this product is not ready to sell. Two other users have placed customer reviews which says that each time they tried to load the program, it appears in the menu bar and then crashes – Fail. It doesn’t look too promising, if you have not bought it already then maybe it will be better to wait for a later version with the bugs ironed out.