Nuance has posted the following “Product Discontinuation Notice” for Dragon Professional Individual for Mac.
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 10/22/2018 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.
Source: Nuance Communications, Inc.
MacDailyNews Take: Do you use Dragon Professional Individual for Mac?
Wow! Yes I do. Certainly disappointing. I’d be happy to use the included dictation on my MacBook Pro, unfortunately it is not nearly as fast and accurate as the current version 6 of dragon. Here’s hoping dictation for the Mac will evolve.
Bummer. It’s not something I use every day, but to start an article from scratch or other complex document it is invaluable.
Doesn’t the built in dictation use Dragon’s backend?
Yet one more developer that has been turned off by Apple’s inexplicably bad management of the Mac platform.
Nuance has abandoned the Mac not because the Mac has powerful speech recognition. Nuances says its reason for discontinuing Dragon Professional Individual for Mac comes from “constantly evaluating its product portfolio to see how we can best meet the needs of our customers and business.” Quite simply, enough people have abandoned the Mac that they didn’t see a business case to keep developing for the Mac.
Needless to say, Nuance continues to offer newer and better speech recognition software on Windows, including specialized versions for legal, medical, law enforcement, etc. What does Apple offer? Siri sucks.
Market share matters. This is what happens when you don’t keep hardware and software fresh.
This could just be the harbinger for Siri being the primary speech engine on Macs.
Or, they look at macOS and see an ever shrinking market and have determined it’s not worth the effort.
Or they are being subsidized by a sub company of Microsoft. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I don’t use it everyday, but when I do, it’s invaluable. A real loss. They absorbed an earlier app for the Mac only to take everything away. I never did like the company, just the product.
What about alternatives on Mac? What else is recommended?