by We have a love affair with voice recognition here and especially DragonDictate. For a program which marvels at taking the spoken work and converting it to text theres an equal amount of joy and frustration. In short it’s too damn easy to loose work with a click of a button, here’s a sunday afternoon story for you.
Some months ago Nuance released Dragon express in the App Store, a small application that used for dedicated dictation purposes but without all the bells and whistles of the fully featured DragonDictate 3 package. Receiving negative reviews and no updates since release it looked like a long forgotten part of the Nuance range until making a similar type of appearance in DragonDictate 3you use for dedicated dictation purposes. With no updates since it’s released in looks like this has been a long forgotten program in till DragonDictate three.
The built in Express Editor is a similar window to what it used to be in the App store but with less functinality, no send to email, twitter or Facebook, only the UI remains the same and the same bugs and severe UI annoyances.
Not all applications work well with DragonDictate, Safari running WordPress is a prime candidate for this so having an exclusive window to dictate into rather than using the notepad is a nice idea. You simply dictate into to this dedicated window without fear of overwriting anything on a different page and then click the transfer button.
Doing this does exactly that, transfer what’s in that box to the most active window but once again this is where will the hugest flaws lie with the DragonDictate range of products.
How to Easily Loose What You’ve dictated.
If say you click the transfer button but have mistakenly clicked onto a different target window, it will attempt try to send the text to that window, annoying at best, devistating at worst. “No problem” you might think “simply reopen the express editor and re-transfer my dictation”.
Errm Nope…. You can’t it’s not as simple as what you might want it to be. Your dictation is gone. Once the data has left the express editor window it gone. You can’t do CTRL + Z or look into an undoable option because there are none.
Does anyone at Nuance listen… ever?
It’s once again another glaringly simple issue that Nuance have obviously chosen to ignore as this is the SAME issue that plagues the iOS application if you have a data time out. Once you make a mistake that’s it, your work is lost unless you’ve been really carefull. For all the plus points Dragon disctate makes me feel like I’m treading on egg shells.
You’d think in this day and age having the option to undo something would be pretty much mandatory. In fact I can’t think of any other application that don’t have the fallback of doing an undo.
Of course the translation speed and accuracy rate in DragonDictate is still superb and the best out there, putting Siri to shame in most of the head to head stuff I’ve done in the past but no matter how great it feels like we are harking back to the 90s in usability and there’s no room for a mistake. What’s the point of a UI revamp, to make me feel better about loosing my work?
Of course I could use notepad but then I’m adding an extra workflow by having to manually copy and paste but however way you look at it losing data with no option to undo in a programme that is focusing around text is simply an excusable.
<rant>This one was bought to you by a person who just lost some great work by having this very thing happen to them</rant>
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