Nuance Announce End-of-Life for Dragon for Mac - Voice Recognition

26 October, 2018

**UPDATE - September 2020** Microsoft enable Transcribe in Word for single and multi-speaker audio. If you have a Office365 account you can use the Dictate and Transcribe features in Word on your Mac. Info at https://dictat.es/word-transcribe

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In a surprise annoucement, this week Nuance announced that it will be pulling the plug on their voice recognition software for macOS - Dragon for Mac.

This is a sad day, we have been involved in the evolution of Dragon for Mac since the early days back in 2009 when at version 1.0 it was owned by MacSpeech and then called Scribe. In 2010 v2 was launched and MacSpeech was swallowed up by Nuance, this was a promising move. Since then we have seen the slow evolution of Dragon for Mac culminating in their last and final release v6.

Citing no reasons for the pull Nuance announced on their website this week that it would be discontinuing Dragon for Mac from 22nd October 2018 with support to cease soon after.

Nuance wrote: 

"Nuance is constantly evaluating its product portfolio to see how we can best meet the needs of our customers and business. After much consideration, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue the Dragon Professional Individual for Mac line-up.

Dragon Professional Individual for Mac is being discontinued effective 10/22/2018 and will no longer be available for purchase. Customers may still receive telephone support for up to 90-days from date of activating the software in North America and up to 180 days from date of software activation in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific regions. Your statutory rights are not affected. Customers who have purchased Dragon Professional Individual for Mac version 6 (“Software”) benefit from a perpetual license to the Software and may continue using the Software.  Nuance will no longer provide updates for the Software after 22nd October 2018 and the Nuance support team will adhere to supporting the Software according to the support policies outlined above. In addition, customers will continue to have access to the Nuance Dragon Knowledgebase for online resources."

This leaves the voice recognition space open on the Mac, perhaps Apple will step up and evolve their built-in macOS dictation, lets hope so. If you haven't used the built-in voice-to-text on your Mac enable it via System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Dictation

For best results make sure you enable "Use Enhanced Dictation" this will let you dictate while offline and stores data and processes audio locally rather than sending your voice snippets to the cloud. This is still a long way off the accuracy and correction capabilities of Dragon for Mac but may be useful for you.