In some ways, Dragon Dictate's ability to control your computer is even more powerful that NaturallySpeaking's, thanks to its command creation tool. Dragon Dictate 4 shares many of the best features of its Windows sibling, making it easy to control your Mac using your voice and rest your hands and eyes by dictating instead of typing, as well as allowing you to go back and edit portions of text by voice if you change your mind about what you want to say. We're fans of the Dragon range of speech recognition software, having given Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 12.5 a Best Buy award last year.

We were pleased to find that, although Dragon Dictate made a number of errors while we were training it to recognise our voice, once we'd got through that initial stage of speech analysis, the only thing we had to routinely edit was punctuation, which you have to insert manually using either voice or keyboard. This is obviously handy if you like to make notes for yourself on the move, but also means that you can turn recordings of interviews, lectures and individual speakers at meetings into an easily readable and referenceable text form. If you make a voice recording using your mobile phone, you can simply turn it into text when you get home. The most significant of the new features is that Dragon Dictate can now transcribe audio from as many sources and voices as you might need. We got hands - and voice - on with the program to test out its capabilities. Nuance has today released its new Dragon Dictate 4 speech recognition software for OS X, packed with a host of tweaks, updates and brand new features.

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