Using Mac dictation with Nisus

Everything related to our flagship word processor.
Post Reply
David Sharp
Posts: 67
Joined: 2008-07-06 23:21:27
Location: Paris, France
Contact:

Using Mac dictation with Nisus

Post by David Sharp »

Does anyone have experience with dictating text directly into NWP using Mac OS's inbuilt service? If so, I'd be interested in any insights or advice you may have. I'd also be interested if anyone's found alternatives to the Apple service that would allow high-quality voice recognition and seamless integration with NWP.

I started out my search for effective dictation software by looking at Dragon Dictate, a standalone piece of software which has long been a reference in the field. However its makers for some reason stopped catering for the Mac several years ago, and the only product they now offer in the Apple universe is an app called Dragon Dictate (https://www.nuance.com/dragon/dragon-anywhere.html) for the Iphone.
That works pretty well, but it only offers a handful of languages other than English, not including my second working language, French. The main practical problem with it is the need to transfer each dictated text to the Mac and then insert it into Nisus, which is laborious.

I recently started experimenting with Apple's built-in service, which has the advantage of offering both my languages, but I'm finding that it tends to drop certain phrases for no apparent reason, and sometimes inexplicably stops transcribing after a few minutes of dictation. (I'm running Ventura 13.3.1 on an M2 MacBook Pro).

It's also not clear to me whether the Apple service can adapt itself to the user's accent and vocabulary, which appears to be the case with Dragon.

I wonder if there are ways of "training" the service—or alternatively whether a specialist software package exists that would work with Nisus better than the Apple system.
Vanceone
Posts: 211
Joined: 2013-05-03 07:06:31

Re: Using Mac dictation with Nisus

Post by Vanceone »

Ah, dictation. I miss Dragon Dictate as well. Apple's built in service works.... sort of. It doesn't do formatting commands, like 'new paragraph' or the like. And the second you touch a key on the keyboard it stops.

Since it moved to an online service, you have to pause in your dictation and let it catch up. Also, at least on my computer that I use it for a lot, it stops about every 100 words or 2 minutes or so. Not sure why.

So I would love to use an alternative. Unfortunately, nothing compares to Dragon. There are a few apps out there, but I think apple's solution is better than most of them.

If the goal is to just dictate text, maybe Dragon Dictate in Parallels?
Post Reply