Clarke Ching's Rocks and Snowballs

DragonDictate 3.0… Hate

OMG this is a frustrating and buggy piece of embarrassment.

I’ve just spent 15 minutes dictating inside the DragonDictate text editor and although the recognition is excellent though randomness with which the cursor moves is unforgivable.

How, how, how did they let this software out the door? I can’t use it if I can’t trust it.

Dragon Dictate 3.0

I’m typing this.

A lesson for me: even though the dictation seems accurate as I’m doing it, it’s not. That’s not the software’s fault - that’s mine. Must pay more attention.

Dragon Dictate 3.0

I have a love hate relationship with DragonDictate.

I love it when I use it for dictating and nothing goes wrong, which sometimes happens.

I hate it because when it doesn't work it just plain wrecks my head.

I upgraded from version 2.5 to 3.0 this week and within 10 minutes of using it I came across three significant bugs. The first is that my microphone suddenly stopped working. The second was when I did a select all then it cut then and undo (or some combination like that) and the text became garbled. The third was when the cursor kept moving itself around the text seemingly randomly (this was while typing, sorry dictating, directly into into Dragon's notepad window).

But then I tried again and I managed to dictate two nice, long emails without any hassle and in maybe one 3rd of the time. So then I loved it. But then the friend moving cursor thing happened again and I hated it again.

So, those are bugs, and this is a brand-new upgrade, and so maybe I should have expected this. I'm guessing the release service pack which will fix these. It is only that will all that is wrong with product, and the company.

The quality of the dictation recognition does seem considerably improved compared to what was a couple of years ago. Which is just astounding. I'm in, honestly, I'm sitting here dictating this out and I am amazed at how accurate it is. But why does that software have to be so clunky and awkward to use? Is it because it's on a Mac? I know in version 2.5 the user manual mentioned right at the end, almost hidden, but it's really hard to integrate into the Mac for a whole bunch of reasons. But considering everything else on the Mac seems – generally – pretty easy to use I wonder if Nuance, the makers of DragonDictate, should maybe take a little break from improving the dictation accuracy and now focus on the usability. In fact, that's definitely what they should do, because for me the accuracy is very, very impressive but I find using the proper incredibly irritating at times. I wish I could give examples and make my complaint more concrete, but am struggling to do that; it's just clunky, okay?

And, don't even get me started on their website or a customer service or the purchasing and installation experience. It's like something out of the 1990s, back when the world didn't do customer service very well.

Anyway, that's me finished whingeing. Let me finish on a high point: I'm not very good at spelling; DragonDictate is. That's cool!

Lean Agile Scotland - Cash FlowDriven Development slides

What an awesome conference!

Here're my slides:

Download Cash Flow Driven Development - LAScotland September 22 2012.pptx (9020.7K)