Although Dragon Home produced the fastest transcriptions of any tool we tested, this wasn’t an unqualified positive: Half of our panelists said that they preferred slower real-time transcriptions to Dragon Home’s sentence-by-sentence transcription method because they found its longer pauses between sentences’ appearance on their screen to be distracting.Īpple Voice Control is easy to use, outperforms major competitors from Google, Microsoft, and Nuance, and offers dozens of command prompts for a smoother experience, an especially helpful feature for people with limited hand dexterity. It also struggled to eliminate all background noise, though you can mitigate such problems by using an external microphone or headset. Like our Apple pick, Dragon Home had trouble with various American dialects and international accents it performed better for those testers with “neutral” American accents. Our panelist with language-processing disabilities said Dragon Home was one of the most accurate dictation options they tried, and the robust command features made it possible for them to quickly navigate their machine. As with all of the dictation software we tried, using Dragon Home involves a learning curve at first, but the Dragon tutorial does a great job of getting you started.
Still, for those able to work within the technology’s constraints, our picks are the best options available for many people who need assistance using a word-processing tool.Īt $200, Nuance Dragon Home 15 is the most expensive speech-recognition tool we tested, but it’s the best option for people who own Windows PCs.
These apps have difficult learning curves, and the inherent bias that humans program into them means that their accuracy can vary, especially for people with various accents, sociolects and dialects like African American Vernacular English, or speech impediments. After considering 18 options, we’ve found that Apple Voice Control and Nuance Dragon Home 15 are more accurate, efficient, and usable than any other dictation tools we’ve tested.īut the technology behind dictation software (also called speech-to-text or voice-recognition software) has some faults. Firing off a quick text or typing a memo can be difficult-or even totally infeasible-if you have limited hand dexterity or chronic pain, but this kind of software can make such tasks a relative breeze. This flexibility is great if you simply need a break from your keyboard, but it’s especially important for people with language-processing disorders or physical disabilities.
Dictation software makes it easy to navigate your computer and communicate without typing a single phrase.
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