![]() This situation is part of a contentious history between Apple and Dragon going back to when Dragon owned and developed their own software. Even when that time comes, it’s unlikely that he will recognize the problems or take steps to resolve them.Ĭonsidering that Apple already licenses Nuance speech recognition IP, it might be possible for Apple to soup up their dictation system with features found in Dragon. For some reason this has not affected Apple’s bottom line, but it’s only a matter of time before the company’s reputation for high standards suffers and sales follow suit. His tolerance for mediocrity in quality control is monumental. Tim Cooke is a nice man, but he seems not to exercise sufficient control over the fading lights in Apple’s executive suites. Who knows when, if ever, they will wake up. As with many big, successful companies, their leadership is far removed from their user base, and hubris has set in. Sad to say, Apple no longer caters to users, as they once did. And he has use of his hands when he needs them, so some of the Mac’s limitations don’t bother him. He just wanted to be able to dictate e-mails and such. Meanwhile, a while back I pointed a client to the Mac’s dictation feature when he got tired of wrestling with Dragon Dictate, and paying for their upgrades. Interestingly, in Safari, pictures and icons retain their true colors when the screen is reversed, which isn’t a bad thing. In my case, I reverse my screen, as now, so that I see white text on a black background, which is, for me, easier to read. Accessibility is clearly not one of their priorities, despite some other features that assist in that regard. But Apple has been fixated on their Goth interface since before Steve Jobs died, and it seems they continue to find their ugly design meme more important than usability or accessibility.Īs a result, I wouldn’t hold my breath for Apple to improve voice recognition in macOS. To my mind, the whole point of the Finder window sidebar is as an aid to navigation, and the loss of color was a serious blow to that objective. Nor is the developer interested in expanding his product, despite my requests that he do so. So I’ve had to get buy with Total Finder, which restores some of them, though by no means all. For some years there was a hack that could restore those colors and icons, but Apple killed that in El Capitan by abandoning the supporting technologies. MacOS is more widely used than it used to be and many more persons with disabilities have come to depend on it.Īs someone with a visual disability, I lost patience with Apple when they abandoned colored and custom icons in the Finder window sidebar in Lion. Then Nuance purchased Mac Speech and their Mac product was reborn.īut I agree, it is incumbent on Apple to fill the void now. Nuance abandoned the Mac version once before, and a company named Mac Speech filled the void for a few years. I’m not familiar with the name you use, Dragon Professional Individual. I would invite other readers to share their thoughts on these questions.Īs I’ve known it, Nuance’s product is called Dragon Dictate. So the question now arises, do existing users who opted for the last, very expensive update, that still never properly worked reliably and often crashed, have recourse against Nuance, given the product never consistenty functioned in a reliable fashion? I have no legal experience but could be grounds for a possible class action lawsuit? I was one of those suckers that did the update hoping for the best. ![]() It is no wonder that given its latest price point, many users probably decided to decline the update offer which likely provided their justification for abandoning the product. That said, it is absolutely outrageous that Nuance effectively doubled the price of the the last update in order to milk their existing customers for as much as the market might bear, without providing meaningful improvements, before abandoning the product. From the day that MacSpeech sold transferred its product to Nuance I was concerned that this would eventually happen given their jaded history. Frankly I am not that unhappy to see them disappear, hopefully opening the door to a more user centric publisher of speech recognition for the Mac should Apple not enhance its current product to fill the gap. Throughout its history Nuance has been an unreliable, buggy, product with abismal technical support. ![]()
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