I've mostly been using the dictation software built into Microsoft Word since the Mac version of Dragon Dictate carked it a couple of years ago. It works pretty well and I don't need headphones if I’m using my M2 MacBook Air. The inbuilt mic is good enough to pick up my voice from across the office.
Anyway, this morning I noticed a slight improvement in another dictation platform, one I use much less frequently – Siri. I used her in reply to a comment from Insomniac in one of the posts below—The Far Side one, I think—and I was sort of composing my thoughts as I went. That meant pausing for a couple of seconds here and there trying to write the sentence in my head before I committed it to the screen.
I noticed when I finally looked at the text, that Siri had inserted either commas or full stops wherever I’d paused. This is new. Also not very good syntactically, because I’d paused to organise my thoughts, not to structure the sentence. But I guess it’s good and bad. It’d be nice not to have to manually dictate every piece of punctuation, but it's also not uncommon to pause during dictation to organise the next couple of thoughts before speaking them out loud.
I don’t see any of the speech recognition solutions getting this right soon, though. And the bigger challenge of dictating quotations or paragraph breaks is even further away. Years probably.
But I thought I would note it because it is a pretty significant change. Even though I don't use Siri to dictate much besides tweets and texts, I do occasionally use her in iOS apps like notepad or Bear if I’m on the toe and trying to compose something longer than 280 characters.
Yeah. Hiccups like this is why I haven't made a serious attempt to use dictation. I've puttered around with it, but for now I'll stick to the keyboard.
So, Microsoft Word on Mac is a viable and usable dictation platform? Would you recommend it?
The reason I ask is that Youngest Daughter is about to start a Uni degree course and wants to use dictation software to help overcome some of her Autism Spectrum issues when drafting / writing assignments - typing speed not fast enough to keep up with brain's train of thought etc. She'd be doing this on a Macbook Air.
May I ask what your specific setup is? And whether you're happy enough with Word's dictation performance to recommend it to others?
I thought. It worked, well.
Love, this four, you
Yeah. Hiccups like this is why I haven't made a serious attempt to use dictation. I've puttered around with it, but for now I'll stick to the keyboard.
The more I use it, the more annoying it becomes
Yeah. I can see that.
So, Microsoft Word on Mac is a viable and usable dictation platform? Would you recommend it?
The reason I ask is that Youngest Daughter is about to start a Uni degree course and wants to use dictation software to help overcome some of her Autism Spectrum issues when drafting / writing assignments - typing speed not fast enough to keep up with brain's train of thought etc. She'd be doing this on a Macbook Air.
May I ask what your specific setup is? And whether you're happy enough with Word's dictation performance to recommend it to others?
Hey tac, this will require a slightly deeper dive so I'll focus on it later today after work is done.
Thanks John.