[MV] Dragon Dictate - is it worth it?

[David Morrison]

>David (and everyone else):
>
>Dragon Dictate 3.0 is simply the best dictation for Macintosh that 
>has ever existed. Like it's predecessors, it will benefit from using 
>the program's built-in NotePad, but to be honest, the advantage this 
>provides is so negligible you will probably not notice it.
>
>In my experience, the more complex the program into which you want 
>to dictate, the greater the likelihood that Dictate may become 
>"confused." In other words, TextEdit is a piece of cake, Word can be 
>a little challenging unless you just use plain text (no formatting), 
>and programs with fields or cells (such as FileMaker, Excel, and 
>Numbers) somewhat problematic. But most of these challenges are 
>simply a matter of learning how to properly use (or sometimes NOT 
>use) Dictate within the target application.
>
>In short, if you get frustrated within a given application, try 
>dictating into the NotePad and use voice commands to cut, switch, 
>and paste (just like the old days). You will find your frustration 
>with this method is far less in SOME (certainly not most) 
>applications if you use this method.
>
>In my experience, Dragon Dictate is about 98-99 percent accurate 
>right out of the box. That still means 1 or 2 errors per hundred, 
>which is still a lot for dictation. With consistent use of 
>correction you can bring this up to 99.5 to 99.7 percent accuracy, 
>or 3 to 5 errors per thousand words dictated.

Thanks Chuck. I will mostly be using it for mail and documents, so 
the Filemaker/spreadsheet problems should not occur.

One thing I would like to be able to do is to type into applications 
in a Parallels virtual machine (Snow Leopard - apps need Rosetta). 
Has anyone tried this? Mavericks dictation certainly does not work 
for this.

Cheers

David