Topic: OS X Mountain lion voice to text

[Perspective]

So I upgraded to mountain lion so I could try the dictation feature. It's actually pretty cool. Since I can't type with both hands, its faster to enter text just by dictating. It takes quite a bit of speech at a time and it's pretty accurate. I generally only have to go back and correct a couple words here and there. This whole post was spoken!

$20 for the upgrade was much better than buying something like Dragon dictation, that's like $200!

[Steve]

Hmm

[Perspective]

Thought you might be interested in that

[Perspective]

The only downside is that I feel like an idiot talking to my computer whenever people are around. I think I'll only use it when I'm alone in the house

[Mike]

Just make sure not to talk dirty to it.  I'll have to try it out.  I just (ok a week ago) updated from Leopard to Mountain Lion on my laptop.

[charlie]

$20 for the upgrade was much better than buying something like Dragon dictation, that's like $200!

For the upgrade from what?

Also, I got the dragon app I think for free. I don't think it worked as well as you describe this, though.

[Mike]

$20 for the upgrade was much better than buying something like Dragon dictation, that's like $200!

For the upgrade from what?

You can upgrade from Snow Leopard (10.6) or Lion (10.7) for $20.

[charlie]

Shoot... I think we have 10.5.

[Mike]

Yeah, if you have 10.5 it is a PITA.  I lucked out as work was upgrading our laptops from 10.5 to 10.6 so I just borrowed one of the disks and did the upgrade.  Don't feel too bad about it since I paid for the upgrade to mountain lion immediately after.

[Perspective]

$20 for the upgrade was much better than buying something like Dragon dictation, that's like $200!

For the upgrade from what?

Also, I got the dragon app I think for free. I don't think it worked as well as you describe this, though.

Yeah, I upgraded from lion. DragonDictate is a pretty popular product. I think it's free on phones, but the version for OS X is $200.
http://www.nuance.com/for-individuals/by-product/dragon-for-mac/index.htm

[Steve]

Do they have a windows version?

i would feel dumb talking to it when people are around. How is it with ambient noise, like people on the phone or a tv

[Perspective]

Yeah there's a window version too. I'm not sure how it is with ambient noise, I haven't tried but it probably messes things up. These types of technologies generally don't work well when there's background noise.

[Steve]

there is always some kind of noise here

[Perspective]

So I've been using this to try and write a paper. It's not that great for technical writing. Sometimes I say entire sentence and it doesn't produce anything at all because it can't understand the terminology. I think their models are trained on emails and instant messages. It definitely works a lot better for that stuff. still, if I break down the sentence into parts it's still faster than trying to type with one hand!