Dictation and DEVONthink

I just got a new Mac Mini (nope, not the VERY newest… I heard that was a bust).

And I’m using Mountain Lion Dictation - it’s beyond amazing if you haven’t tried it.

Anyhoo, there’s a few minor annoyances… some characters (when published to a website) have weird displays.

Question: can you help me come up with a way to convert ellipsis and hyphens into … and a short hyphen once I’m done with Dictation?

This is related to DEVONthink? Perhaps the Apple support forums would be able to help?

Yes, the dictation feature in iOS6 and Mountain Lion is surprisingly good.

Over the years I bought a couple of dictation applications for the Mac and could never get practical use from them.

The current dictation feature in iOS 6 and Mountain Lion is faster and more accurate than previous dictation apps for Mac.

I was so impressed with Nuance’s Mac support that I ordered the rather expensive full Dragon Dictation for OS X with Bluetooth microphone and just received it a couple of days ago. I’ve only just begun to learn the system, but can already produce text with it faster than I can type.

However, korm is right. Check with Apple’s support forums on tricks of using Dragon in OS X or iOS6. (Obviously, the full app I bought is more fully featured.)

I’ve already tried.

There is no way to turn ellipsis into dot dot dot.

I can see this coming down the pike, but it’s not here now.

Any ideas on how to fix this after dictation… AppleScript?

I’m still not grasping why this is a DEVONthink issue, but…

According to Apple (here), speaking “ellipsis” should result in Dictation outputting “…” Perhaps if that’s not happening, then there’s a need to train Dictation to recognize your speech patterns? (That’s not an insult … it’s merely how these things work. :confused: There a certain words that I just can’t make Dragon Dictate recognize.)

In any event, Dictation is producing text, which can be edited by any number of text editors (including DEVONthink) that have standard search & replace functions. It seems that writing a script to do that would be a lot of work.

In fact, despite my best efforts, I can’t get Dragon Dictate 3 to recognize the word DEVONthink… :smiley:

Say ALL CAPS “devon” NO SPACE NO CAP “think”.

This is the sort of term that I hope the full version of Dragon will let me define as a dictionary term, typed by a cue word or phrase when spoken.

Finally got around to testing “ellipsis” using Mountain Lion’s Dictation in DEVONthink. Dictation recognizes “ih-lip-sis” but not “ih-lip-seez” – in my standard American twang. So, I can see how it would fail in some cases.

Thanks Bill! That will save me a lot of frustration. Putting DEVONthink in the dictionary and training didn’t seem to help.

Regards,

Mark

I found it.

Here’s what to do… go to Mountain Lion’s “Language & Text”… then click on the Text tab and uncheck “Use symbol and text substitution”.

I gotta tell ya’… Smart Quotes and the like are the worst inventions ever (in my humble opinion).

Smart Quotes in DEVONthink can be turned off at Preferences > Editing