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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.
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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.
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?
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.I was rear-ended in an MVA and now have a lot of trouble reading, so I am looking for assistive software.
It may be worth trying that first before going third party as it has native OS integration. :)
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.
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!