

The original: Diabetes mellitus, or simply diabetes, is a group of metabolic diseases in which a person has high blood sugar, either because the pancreas does not produce enough insulin, or because cells do not respond to the insulin that is produced. I then read the same text with Dragon Dictate, using just the microphone. I tried Mountain Lion’s dictation feature twice, once with the internal microphone of my Thunderbolt display and once with a microphone that is very good for speech recognition. Wikipedia article about diabetes), to see how each of the solutions worked.

I did a test, using a text that is fairly technical (the First, you “train” the program by reading about five minutes of text the first time you create a voice “profile.” This helps the program understand the way you say words. The Dragon Dictate methodĭragon Dictate has a number of advantages compared to the OS X dictation feature. The more you dictate, the more useful it is to have a good microphone. If you have a noise-canceling microphone, you can use that with the OS X dictation feature, and your results will be much better. Finally, the OS X dictation feature doesn’t learn from your corrections: If the text it returns is incorrect, you can manually edit it, but these edits won’t help it avoid those mistakes in the future. Second, you can only speak for up to 30 seconds at a time using Mountain Lion’s dictation feature. Since speech recognition depends on picking up on some subtle vocal distinctions, you might find that your results are not ideal. First, if you use your Mac’s internal microphone, the sound quality of your voice won’t be great. There are some limitations to OS X’s dictation tool. I use iOS’s dictation often to reply to emails, and I’ve had transcription fail enough times to not count on it always being available.)

(It’s important to note that you need Internet access for dictation to work, and that sometimes the servers just don’t respond. Mountain Lion then sends your speech to a remote server, which transcribes it and sends it back to your Mac to be entered as text. When you’ve finished, you either click on Done or press the Return key. To insert dictated words, you click wherever you want them to appear, then press the keyboard shortcut and start talking.
