A familiar sight for Mac users of Dragon Professional Individual 6. Even getting the thing to launch could be a challenge – keeping it stable long enough to deliver any form of accurate recognition was even more problematic. Instead, we got a piece of software that promised much (including the new, improved “Deep Learning” speech engine) and instead delivered tear-your-hair-out frustration in spades. This seemed to be the release where Nuance finally unified the branding across both versions of the software, bringing Dragon for the Mac in line with its more mature, feature rich Windows counterpart. Something tells me that it wasn’t meant to be like this. But this latest release has been nothing short of a disaster. I don’t say that lightly, by the way – the Mac version has never exactly been a bastion of well-written software. Out of my many years of using Dragon both on the PC and Mac platforms, Dragon Professional Individual for Mac 6 has been the worst performing version of the software I have ever come across. The 6.0.6 update that was recently released appears to – shock, horror! – fix many of the terrible problems that have plagued this version of the software. After sixupdates to the current version of Dragon Professional Individual for Mac (including one that was subsequently pulled after it turned the program from a crashing, buggy mess into an even worse crashing, buggy mess), it appears Nuance may finally have delivered a stable version of the product. Things are still pretty stable although some quirks still remain. However, Dragon has now been updated to version 6.0.8 which also brings High Sierra compatibility. I have high expectations, but I know it will take some patience.UPDATE Dec 16 2017: The information in this article is still valid. I will update you on how easily I can train the program out of this type of error. Sometimes when I select text, change it, and then delete the correction, the program changes the sentence more radically than I anticipate. I am also having trouble with the editing options. And of course, getting it to properly spell Hungarian names will be… an interesting challenge. The most common errors I am experiencing with the Dragon so far are extra spaces after periods and commas, incorrect capitalization, and misspellings of homophones. (Please note the subtle errors in the previous paragraph, which I did not edit.) They are relatively intuitive commands, but I’m just not used to using them while I think about what to “write.” Learning the various voice commands for inserting punctuation, re-spelling different words, and navigating different parts of the text will also take some time. I think some problems I’m having with this software are doing to the fact that I’m not used speaking my text. I did not have the AC unit running while I trained my Dragon. (That should read “or.”) I do have a window air-conditioning unit running right now so that is affecting the way the headphone understands my speech. To give you an idea of the accuracy of this program relatively “out of the box,” I am not going to edit this sentence. So overall, it averages out to a decent start up time. However, the initial training session only took 10 minutes after installing the software, and now I’m writing this post. This seemed like a long time for a program to load onto my computer. I began setup of the Dragon at 5 PM, and it took almost 20 minutes for the CD to install. After you launch your installed Dragon, the program walks you through voice training and microphone set up, as well as several tutorials on the different functionalities of the program. Next, you install the CD and follow the instructions in the startup wizard. All that came with the Dragon box was the installation CD, the headset, and a very short “quick reference card.” The first step is to connect your microphone and make sure it works with your computer. When I first opened the box, the Dragon package seemed a little sparse. Still, considering that I only opened the package an hour and a half ago, and I took a 45 minute break to get groceries, I’d say it works pretty well. Secondly, I should say that it just took me five tries to get that sentence right. First of all, I should say I’m using Dragon Dictate to “write” this post.
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