Starting the day with Siri and Dragon Dictate

Before I even opened my eyes I was able to send a post off to Facebook, check the time and also I sent a message to my wife. The spelling in the Facebook message was okay but a couple of the words were incorrect instead of saying sent her, it said centre. Siri read the message back to me and it sounded okay and then so it is all quite impressive I think. Even if my iPad has plenty of battery in his when I go to bed I still like to plug it in just so I have Siri available to talk to 1st thing the morning. You know how it is in the morning when you don’t want to open your eyes. You certainly don’t want to open your eyes and peer into a bright screen and so Siri is just perfect for starting the day.

I’m really pleased with Apple Watch OS2 because it is now possible to start a workout by asking Siri to start it for me. It saves you a bit of time searching through the applications for the activity application and then choosing which activity and then finally pressing the button to start. It doesn’t seem to be able to stop the activity when you are finished, but that would be nice too.

Dragon for Mac 5 is quite unreliable

This morning when dictating into Day One in version 5.01 of DragonDictate El Capitan

I was just in the spelling mode and I gave the command spacebar and instead of putting in a space, DragonDictate deleted the last word in the sentence and pasted in this –nice is now possible to start a workout bya – this is really weird behaviour from DragonDictate. The text it put in, is from five sentences previous which makes it even extra weird.

So I posted onto the Nuance community forum and hopefully the developers of the application will also see the post. They really do have a long way to go to get the application back to a decent level. In version 4.5 of DragonDictate everything was working pretty well and I am regretting paying the money to upgrade to version 5.

UPDATE

There has been a couple of updates to the software since the first release and it has got a little better. I’m still getting the extra letter thrown in at the end of a dictate session randomly. I can delete the letter and issue a ‘Cache Document’ command to be able to carry on with it. Still getting some odd behaviour with the recognition of text from time to time and again caching the document is needed to sort the problem. I can go for about 20 minutes and even 30 minutes before the problems arise and it seems sometimes the best thing to do is to change application for the dictation. So a move from Byword to Scrivener or in the other direction will let me keep working.

Still waiting for the Dragon Anywhere to surface. There was a preview video shown during the week so it might be coming soon. I’d love to have the better than Siri dictation on mobile. I’m wondering if it will be with the recognition dictionary on the device or will it have to go off to a server and be returned as text. If you don’t always have internet connection, the first option is preferable. The thing with that is the size of the software needed for recognition of voice can be huge. I probably have enough space on my mobile devices but some people will not. Let’s see how it goes.