This is my preferred software solution on Mac OS for text to speech. With Natural Reader 16, the desktop app is finally on par with the webapp. It is basically the webapp but wrapped in an app container, the one exception is that the desktop app includes what was formerly known as the Floating Bar, which is now called the Miniboard and resides under the overflow menu 'More', a feature I use a. Speech to text (STT) software is a type of assistive technology program that converts words that are spoken aloud to electronic written text to support increased demonstration of learning and independence. SST can also be referred to as dictation or Speech Recognition Programs. Best text to speech software for mac and ios. Are you having a hard time finding the most effective text to speech software which will turn any text document or web page into an audio file? If yes, then look no further anymore. Here is a list of the best text to speech software for Mac.
All of the products listed below have been tried and tested by staff at The Dyslexia Association.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking
Control your computer by voice with speed and accuracy. Dragon speech recognition software is better than ever. Talk and your words appear on the screen. Say commands and your computer obeys. Dragon is 3x faster than typing and it's 99% accurate. Master Dragon right out of the box, and start experiencing big productivity gains immediately.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is speech recognition software which allows the user to not only dictate into documents, but also control the computer with their voice. This is ideal for someone with dyslexia who may have difficulty with spelling or is better at communicating verbally or for someone who has physical difficulties and is unable to use a keyboard / mouse.
Another great feature of Dragon is that it can be linked to a dictaphone and transcribe your voice notes into a document on your PC.
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Most users of Dragon require some training in how to use it effectively.
If you are using Dragon on a PC, you will also require a compatible headset & microphone. A list of compatible devices is available on Nuance’s website, however we regularly recommend the Plantronics DSP 400 folding headset or the Jabra Evolve 80 headset which has a closed-cup headphone design for people who find distractability an issue.
Built-in speech to text
The majority of mobile devices have excellent speech-to-text functions built-in as part of their accessibility features. For example Siri.
In October 2018, Nuance announced that it has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac and will support it for only 90 days from activation in the US or 180 days in the rest of the world. The continuous speech-to-text software was widely considered to be the gold standard for speech recognition, and Nuance continues to develop and sell the Windows versions of Dragon Home, Dragon Professional Individual, and various profession-specific solutions.
This move is a blow to professional users—such as doctors, lawyers, and law enforcement—who depended on Dragon for dictating to their Macs, but the community most significantly affected are those who can control their Macs only with their voices.
What about Apple’s built-in accessibility solutions? macOS does support voice dictation, although my experience is that it’s not even as good as dictation in iOS, much less Dragon Professional Individual. Some level of voice control of the Mac is also available via Dictation Commands, but again, it’s not as powerful as what was available from Dragon Professional Individual.
TidBITS reader Todd Scheresky is a software engineer who relies on Dragon Professional Individual for his work because he’s a quadriplegic and has no use of his arms. He has suggested several ways that Apple needs to improve macOS speech recognition to make it a viable alternative to Dragon Professional Individual:
- Support for user-added custom words: Every profession has its own terminology and jargon, which is part of why there are legal, medical, and law enforcement versions of Dragon for Windows. Scheresky isn’t asking Apple to provide such custom vocabularies, but he needs to be able to add custom words to the vocabulary to carry out his work.
- Support for speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition: Currently, macOS’s speech recognition is speaker-independent, which means that it works pretty well for everyone. But Scheresky believes it needs to become speaker-dependent, so it can learn from your corrections to improve recognition accuracy. Also, Apple’s speech recognition isn’t continuous—it works for only a few minutes before stopping and needing to be reinvoked.
- Support for cursor positioning and mouse button events: Although Scheresky acknowledges that macOS’s Dictation Commands are pretty good and provide decent support for text cursor positioning, macOS has nothing like Nuance’s MouseGrid, which divides the screen into a 3-by-3 grid and enables the user to zoom in to a grid coordinate, then displaying another 3-by-3 grid to continue zooming. Nor does Apple have anything like Nuance’s mouse commands for moving and clicking the mouse pointer.
When Scheresky complained to Apple’s accessibility team about macOS’s limitations, they suggested the Switch Control feature, which enables users to move the pointer (along with other actions) by clicking a switch. He talks about this in a video.
Unfortunately, although Switch Control would let Scheresky control a Mac using a sip-and-puff switch or a head switch, such solutions would be both far slower than voice and a literal pain in the neck. There are some better alternatives for mouse pointer positioning:
- Dedicated software, in the form of a $35 app called iTracker.
- An off-the-shelf hack using Keyboard Maestro and Automator.
- An expensive head-mounted pointing device, although the SmartNav is $600 and the HeadMouse Nano and TrackerPro are both about $1000. It’s also not clear how well they interface with current versions of macOS.
Regardless, if Apple enhanced macOS’s voice recognition in the ways Scheresky suggests, it would become significantly more useful and would give users with physical limitations significantly more control over their Macs… and their lives. If you’d like to help, Scheresky suggests submitting feature request feedback to Apple with text along the following lines (feel free to copy and paste it):
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![Microsoft speech to text download Microsoft speech to text download](/uploads/1/2/8/3/128353724/229491047.jpg)
Because Nuance has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, it is becoming difficult for disabled users to use the Mac. Please enhance macOS speech recognition to support user-added custom words, speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition that learns from user corrections to improve accuracy, and cursor positioning and mouse button events.
Thank you for your consideration!
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Thanks for encouraging Apple to bring macOS’s accessibility features up to the level necessary to provide an alternative to Dragon Professional Individual for Mac. Such improvements will help both those who face physical challenges to using the Mac and those for whom dictation is a professional necessity.