Playing with the Mountain Lion features

Mountain Lion dictation, my favourite Mountain Lion feature so far.

One of things most interesting for me is the dictation service within the Mountain Lion, this is because I have the application DragonDictate which are used for all of my dictating of articles. DragonDictate is very good but there are one or two problems I have when I try to dictate into other applications. I am finding that I can use the mountain lion dictation to work with those other applications and keep DragonDictate for the long articles where I need to have more options for editing. The reason that I don’t use DragonDictate for dictation into applications such as Marsedit or Byword is that it’s a fouls up with living out of certain letters in some words sometimes it will be the D and then other times it will miss as the letter T for example. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why it does this and even though I have tried to fix it I have been unable to do so.

UPDATE – I have fixed this now. Seems that the problem was an incompatibility with TextExpander. I have a hot key set now to toggle TE on and off. Dragon Dictate now works a treat.


free applications

iMage Tools

An upgrade to Mountain Lion that was as smooth as silk

With my upgrade to Mountain Lion, the way I did it was to do an update over the top on what was already there and it worked very well, no problems whatsoever. I haven’t heard of many reports from the internet of people that have had problems, but I imagine there will be one or two that get caught by an incompatibility of software perhaps. With regards the dictation, I did find that the first time I tried to run out DragonDictate, the application did complain and was unable to access the microphone as the Mountain Lion dictation had already captured it. After I closed down the Dragon dictation and also closed to the Mountain Lion dictation, I started up DragonDictate first and it was able to grab the microphone and allow me to use it.

More tests of the Mountain Lion dictation service

Testing the dictation that can be done with Mountain lion which I have just installed on this computer. Seems to be working okay so far, although, I’m finding the dictation is very slow to come up with the actual text. This is because it has to send the data off to the Internet and then bring it back again as text. paragraph now I’m trying with a different microphone and headset microphone instead of using the Samson which was the one set up to use before. That seemed to work a lot better and that text came back a lot quicker too. I don’t think this is anywhere near as good as Dragon dictation, because with Dragon dictation I can select words and change words and do some editing with the actual application, but with this I have to edit with manual keyboard strokes.

Mountain Lion dictation accuracy

On the other hand though, I’m finding that generally the conversion of the text from speech is actually pretty good and accurate. You get to talk for about 30 seconds and if you go over that time the computer beeps to let you know. With the Dragon dictation you can talk for pretty much as long as you want. To have the dictation started I have to press the function key twice, if I wanted to, I could use other shortcut keys. I would say that the function key is very useful. At least I am not having any problems with the dictating into the application Byword. I will probably be out to use this in just about any of the other applications on the Mac.

Mountain Lion features

So now we do some dictation into the dictation system of mountain lion and it looks like it’s working okay when I tried at the first time it didn’t work I needed to close down DragonDictate and I had to switch off the dictation on mountain Lion and then restart again for it to work. Definitely the best of the Mountain Lion features.

This article has been dictated totally using Mountain Lion dictation

Now that I have had plenty of time to play with the dictation, it is right that I start to look at other new things with Mountain Lion. The notification area springs in from the right hand side. I think I’m going to set it so that it works just with a keyboard shortcut and is not activated by the magic trackpad. Loving the new Mountain Lion features.