Dragon Naturally Speaking Standard is on sale at just $39.99 for the next 2 and a half hours on Amazon:

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travel...eaking-9-3999/

Let me revive this thread to ask specifically about Dragon/Nuance for Mac. Does anyone have any particular experience with it?

Many thanks,

I used the PREVIOUS version of the best VR for MAC, which was called MACSPEECH which was pretty darn good.

At macworld this year, Macspeech introduced a NEW version of Macspeech called Macspeech Dictate. This product NOW uses the nuance/dragon VR engine, and apparently GREATLY improves accuracy. I haven't bought the upgrade yet (I should have, it was only 79$ at the time) but my FATHER bought it and said it really improved his use of the product. And, he thought it was pretty good to begin with.

I haven't been out there yet to try it, but I'll try in next month when I am on the east coast. Reviews show it to be quite good.

There is no longer a DRAGON/NUANCE product for MAC sold by Nuance.

I run the PC version in an XP virtual machine using VM Ware. I use either a microphone or a Sony digital recorder. It works pretty well. The newer Macs have enough performance to do VR in the virtual machine with decent speed, at least with XP. Im not sure I would want to run it in Vista that way.

On Windows Vista the speech recognition is built in and works great! I have been utilizing it over the last week and only a few minor issues, like not working to type text here in a forum or elsewhere if using Firefox, and not typing body of mails in Thunderbird, but most
other apps seem to work just fine.

I really like the fact that you can speak in full sentence structure and it accurately understands in most cases even for complex words like know, wind, effect/affect.

I am interested in your experience in using this software with your digital recorder. Are you dictating - that is fixed distance from microphone, speaking to the machine? I have not been able to get good results with digital recording of lectures to an open room. Using the "teacher's voice" with a variety of pitch and volume and pacing seems to be beyond Dragon 9.

This past week version 10 has been announced. I am not sure enough of it to invest even the $99.00 they are asking for upgrade ... unless I get some tricks!

Thanks for a response if you have the time!