Nuance Discontinues Dragon Professional Individual for Mac

Nuance this week announced that it is discontinuing Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, effective two days ago on Monday, October 22, 2018. The software is no longer available for purchase, but customers who purchased version 6 of the software and have a perpetual license will be able to keep using Dragon Professional Individual.

As of now, Nuance will no longer provide updates for the software. Customers will still be able to receive telephone support for up to 90 days from the date of activating the software in North America, and up to 180 days from activation in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. They can also visit the Nuance Dragon Knowledgebase for online resources.

Nuances says its reason for discontinuing Dragon Professional Individual for Mac comes from "constantly evaluating its product portfolio to see how we can best meet the needs of our customers and business." The software allowed Mac users to gain access to powerful dictation and transcription tools with an emphasis on streamlining user workflows, allowing users to dictate reports, spreadsheets, and emails, which Dragon converted to text.

Now, users will be able to buy Dragon Professional Individual for Windows, Dragon Legal Individual for Windows, and Dragon Anywhere for Android and iOS. Dragon Medical for Mac was also discontinued back in August.

Tags: Nuance, Dragon

Top Rated Comments

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AJ Mac25

16 months ago

This is ridiculous. They took a great program from the Mac world, MacSpeech, and destroyed it. Support was always terrible and software prices were expensive. They are a monopoly and now we are left without a viable dictation software program for the Mac platform. Time for Apple or someone else to step in. Sad

Rating: 14 Votes

keysofanxiety

16 months ago

Good. Nuance were one of the worst companies on Mac. Their software was extremely poor compared to Windows.

Furthermore they pissed off a lot of people following Lion (or Mountain Lion, I forget which). Their Dragon Dictate software was available but not supported on the latest OS. They continued to sell it for about 4 months whilst the latest OS was out, then released a brand new version with compatibility on the latest OS and said the previous version wasn't compatible with it. I was gobsmacked.

I have grown a deep loathing for this company following 6 years on first/second line support for a DSA company in the UK and we had to be intimately familiar with loads of assistive software. Luckily I've since left that role but the pain remains.

Rating: 14 Votes

avtella

16 months ago

Swype was such an awesome keyboard when it first released then Nuance bought it and destroyed it.

Rating: 7 Votes

keysofanxiety

16 months ago

Do either of you know of good speech-to-text and/or text-to-speech apps (or one app that will do both) for Macs?

I was rear-ended in an MVA and now have a lot of trouble reading, so I am looking for assistive software.

The built-in Siri on macOS is pretty good for speech to text and the built in reader on macOS can convert any highlighted text to speech. You can have both triggering on a keyboard shortcut of your discretion.

It may be worth trying that first before going third party as it has native OS integration. :)

Rating: 7 Votes

keysofanxiety

16 months ago

Yup. I had a version of DD and found it cumbersome to use. I'm surprised Apple hasn't done more with speech inout on the Mac given what they've done with Siri, iOS and AppleTV relative to speech input.

Yep, you'd think with all Apple tout about accessibility, this might be on the list. Mind you, Nuance may well have had some antitrust threats for Apple (wouldn't surprise me), much like Kaspersky did for Microsoft.

At least now, Apple have no excuse not to fully develop speech control for upcoming macOS releases.

Rating: 5 Votes

mschmalenbach

16 months ago

It also interpreted a statement that my 80 year old patient "enjoys cooking" as "enjoys cocaine". As far as I know, it's not why she has the sniffles. : )

One of my team is Hong Kong Chinese - when he first introduced himself to the 65 students in the room who were from all over the world, he said his name was Bernard and he liked cooking - what they and I heard was that he too like cocaine!!

I had to quickly jump in and explain!!

We still joke about that 2 years later!

Rating: 5 Votes

artfossil

16 months ago

[USER=47648]@Val-kyrie[/USER]

I think that dictating with the built-in microphone works remarkably well. In fact, I dictated this comment. Have you given it a try?

(Edited to add: I've used and loved Dragon Anywhere for short term but complex projects on my iPad. I just buy it for a month and then cancel.)

Rating: 4 Votes

Mick-Mac

16 months ago

I just joined the discussion to say that Nuance are an evil and disgusting company and I gave up on any of their software years ago. Read this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/business/goldman-sachs-and-a-sale-gone-horribly-awry.html

Rating: 4 Votes

infantrytrophy

16 months ago

Nuance is a horrible company. Many used and loved Paperport. Then Nuance bought it and destroyed it. After 5 years I’m still converting files out of paperport :(

I was in the same situation years ago after scanning hundreds of files into PaperPort on a Windows PC. When I switched to a Mac, the PaperPort-created .max files could not be read. After several years I discovered GraphicConverter, a wonderful file-converting app that is able to convert .max files. In its later years, Paperport was able to create .pdf files, but too late for me - I was stuck with the earlier .max files.

Give GraphicConverter a try - you will probably like it.

Rating: 4 Votes

gmm421

16 months ago

I remember using Dragon version 3 on Windows and it was the pits. Version 7 was a big step up. But, on the Mac, it has always been buggy. The built-in Apple speech recognition is on par with Dragon dictate, which Nuance wanted you to re-purchase every year or two. Good riddance. I'll use their Windows product on my Windows virtual machine partition.
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Would be nice if a medical or legal dictionary was offered for macOS so that Siri recognizes more medical words. Would also be beneficial to add a medical dictionary to iOS. I don't know how many times I've texted a doc and autocorrect thinks I've "intimated" instead of "intubated" a patient.

It also interpreted a statement that my 80 year old patient "enjoys cooking" as "enjoys cocaine". As far as I know, it's not why she has the sniffles. : )

Rating: 4 Votes

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