[OS X TeX] Dragon Dictate and Tex

[Don Green Dragon]

Hello All, 

According to the dates below, the messages that I’m responding to are rather old — October 2010 — but 
On 13Oct2010, at 2:00 PM, David Messerschmitt <messer at eecs.berkeley.edu> wrote:

> A couple of people reported positive experiences with Dragon Dictate (or its predecessor product) used with TexShop, so
> I bought, downloaded, and tried it. I can report that it works just fine with the TexShop default editor, just like
> what is described in the documentation.
> 
> I am not sure it makes sense to enter commands and equations by speech input, so I tend to mix mouse/keyboard,
> and use dictation to enter the mostly-text paragraphs in between.
> This works fine, but does eliminate the possibility of using speech commands for editing anything other than
> the paragraph most recently dictated.
> 
> Overall Dragon saves a lot of keystrokes and time, and reduces the chances for repetitive stress problems.
> It is especially nice for composing emails (like this one).
> For those of you with iPhones, there is a Dragon app available for free.
> 
> -dave
> 
> 
> On Oct 7, 2010, at 1:09 PM, N S wrote:
> 
>> While I can't speak for the new Dragon Dictate, I have used its direct predecessor (I bought it back in early Sept.), MacSpeech Dictate.  It works well in terms of dictating directly into TexShop.  On the fly corrections, training by voice and spelling all work without having to leave TexShop.  Every now and then it gets confused as to the text in the document, but a restart of Dictate fixes that quickly.  I set up macros for common bits of notation that I use in my writing and that saved a few trips to the keyboard.
>> 
>> Hope that helps,
>> 
>> - Nirav
>> 
>> On Oct 7, 2010, at 2:45 PM, David Messerschmitt wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> Anybody tried the new Dragon Dictate for Mac with TeX, and in particular with TeXShop?
>>> In particular does it work for entering text directly into TexShop, or some other compatible editor?
>>> I havent found a list of compatible apps on the Nuance website.
>>> 
>>> -dave
>>> <<snip>>

I’ve just started using Mavericks 10.9 together with TeXShop 3.26 and find that the dictation device does not work at all. The menu item "Edit -> Start Dictation» brings up the microphone icon but dictation is not functional. In 

"System Preferences -> Dictation & Speech» 

I have check-marked "Use enhanced dictation» which resulted in a download of about 875 MB. Dictation "sort of" works with TextEdit but there is no mechanism for the dictation program «to learn» my enunciation. If there is I do not know how to evoke it.

I also tried to use dictation without the ‘enhanced’ version. Again it worked poorly with TextEdit but not with TeXShop.

In TeXShop, the problem (here) is that dictated  words which appear on a line may suddenly be erased and then overwritten by following dictation. In consequence, dictation is quite unusable. 

I wonder if anyone is looking into this. I agree with David Messerschmitt that, in some instances, dictation could be quite useful. 


don green dragon
fergdc at shaw.ca