In general the Mac lagged a little behind the performance of Dragon on the Windows PC, but I did not find it slow or unresponsive at all. The windows PC has 8 GB RAM and the Mac has 4 GB RAM. We cannot expect it to be perfect! Speed/performanceīoth the Mac and Windows computer have Intel i5 processors. Now before I start telling you more about how it went, I would like to stress the fact that Dragon for Windows has existed for a long time.Īlthough Apple is no stranger to speech recognition software, this is the very first iteration of the new Apple Voice Control feature on Mac OS Catalina. I’ve also cut out the longer pauses when I was thinking about what to say next. I have indicated where errors occurred and put in some text comments when something unexpected happened. In the video at the bottom of this post, you can see the results of my dictation on both computers simultaneously. The text was rather off-the-cuff and it ended up being 215 words long. Then I analysed the dictated text on both computers and examined the results and calculated the number of recognition mistakes. That is important, because we want both speech recognition programs to have exactly the same sound and pronunciation to work from. Today I am comparing dictation with Dragon Professional Individual on a Windows computer to dictation with Apple Voice Control on a Mac.įor this comparison I dictated into two computers simultaneously. A comparison of Dragon and Apple Voice Control They may have figured that, as a paid software, they wouldn't be able to compete with a free built-in speech recognition app. For those of you who remember there being a Dragon for Mac, you are correct, but this product was discontinued by Nuance over a year ago.Īt the time I wondered about the reason, but problably Nuance got wind of Apple developing their own powerful Voice Control. And it is free, which is a wonderful bonus. Unlike Windows Speech Recognition and Dragon, Apple Voice Control doesn't need a Windows computer!įinally, there is a comprehensive speech recognition software for the Mac and iPad. It does not need an Internet connection all processing of the dictation and commands takes place locally. Like Windows Speech Recognition and Dragon, Apple Voice Control, runs on the computer itself. Apple Voice Controlīut there is a new kid on the block: Apple Voice Control. Windows Speech Recognition, Google Voice Type and Apple keyboard dictation all offer the option to dictate text, but none is as powerful as Dragon. Traditionally, Dragon NaturallySpeaking has been the gold standard for speech recognition software for the general public.

Voice dictation for mac