Should I keep Dragon installed alongside Amical?

Only if you genuinely use Dragon's command grammar — the spoken commands that move your cursor, click buttons, switch apps, and fire macros without touching the keyboard or mouse. If you only used Dragon for dictating text into emails and documents, Amical replaces it cleanly and you can uninstall Dragon after your one-week cold-turkey switch period. If you use Dragon as a true hands-free computer control system because of severe RSI or a mobility condition, keep Dragon for command mode and use Amical for the fast text-dictation parts. Running both costs nothing once you have already paid for Dragon.

Why is Amical free when Dragon costs five hundred dollars?

Amical is open-source under the MIT license, runs entirely on-device using a modern Whisper-derived transcription model, and is built by a small team funded outside the consumer-software model that Dragon's owner relies on. Dragon's pricing reflects decades of accumulated R&D, an enterprise sales motion, and a Windows-only support burden — none of which Amical inherits. The free price does not mean Amical is a stripped-down freemium product hiding paid features. The full transcription engine, custom vocabulary, AI rewrites with your own LLM key, push-to-talk hotkey, and multi-language support are all available at no cost.

How long does the muscle-memory retraining from Dragon to Amical take?

Five to seven working days for most ex-Dragon users to stop reaching for command-mode phrases that do not exist in Amical, and two to three weeks to reach the same output speed they had on Dragon. Heavy Dragon users with ten-plus years of habit take longer — sometimes a full month — because their unconscious reflex layer is thicker. The retraining is faster if you switch cold turkey for the first week rather than running both tools in parallel. Parallel use prolongs the reflex confusion because your brain keeps trying Dragon's grammar inside Amical and failing, then context-switching back to Dragon.

How to switch from Dragon NaturallySpeaking to Amical without losing your workflow

A migration guide for Dragon users: export your vocabulary, map command-mode habits to hotkeys, retrain your reflexes, and decide what to keep Dragon for.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking has been the serious dictation tool for two decades. It runs deep command syntax, learns your voice over years, and supports workflows that Amical does not match yet. But Dragon is Windows-only, costs hundreds of dollars, and has not meaningfully evolved since 2018. If you are switching to Amical, do it with eyes open: you are trading mature command grammar for a free, local-first, MIT-licensed dictation engine that pairs naturally with modern AI rewrites. This guide walks through exporting your Dragon vocabulary, mapping your most-used Dragon commands to Amical hotkeys and snippets, retraining the muscle memory that Dragon built in you, and recognising the cases where keeping Dragon alongside Amical is the right call.

Step by step

1
Export your Dragon vocabulary list before you uninstall anything
Open Dragon and go to Vocabulary, then Manage Custom Words. Use the export function to save your custom words as a plain text file. Do the same for Auto-Formatting and List Editor if you customised them. You will end up with one to three text files containing every term you trained Dragon on — names, drug names, legal citations, project codenames. Keep these files in a folder you back up. Even if you do not import them immediately, you will want them when you start building Amical's custom vocabulary list during week one of your switch.
2
Translate your top ten Dragon commands into Amical hotkeys or snippets
List the ten Dragon commands you use most: things like 'new paragraph', 'select that', 'cap that', 'go to end of line', 'scratch that'. Amical handles 'new paragraph', 'comma', 'period', and other punctuation natively when you say them. For the editing commands Amical does not have — 'select that', 'cap that', 'correct that' — bind a system text-expansion tool like Espanso or Raycast snippets to the same phrase, or learn the equivalent keyboard shortcuts. You will not replicate Dragon's full command grammar; aim to cover the ten commands that account for ninety percent of your daily Dragon usage.
3
Retrain your reflexes by switching cold turkey for one full week
Do not run Dragon and Amical in parallel for the first week. Your muscle memory expects Dragon's command grammar, and every time it fires by reflex inside Amical, you will frustrate yourself and assume Amical is broken. Disable Dragon's autostart, set Amical's push-to-talk hotkey, and force yourself to use Amical for every dictation task for five working days. Yes, your output drops by twenty percent during this week. By day six you stop unconsciously saying 'scratch that' and your hands find Amical's hotkey without thinking. Reintroduce Dragon only after this week if you still need it.
4
Import your Dragon vocabulary into Amical, deduplicated and cleaned
Open the Dragon vocabulary text file you exported and prune it. Most Dragon vocabularies accumulate years of one-off proper nouns that you no longer use — clients you stopped working with, ex-colleagues, project codenames from old jobs. Cut everything you have not used in the last six months. Then paste the remaining terms into Amical's custom vocabulary, grouped by category if you write in multiple domains. A clean five-hundred-entry vocabulary outperforms a dirty five-thousand-entry one because Amical's recognition layer weighs every entry as a candidate substitution.
5
Be honest about what Amical does not do that Dragon still does
Amical does not have Dragon's voice-command grammar for mouse control, window switching, or arbitrary application commands. It does not have Dragon's deep speaker-adaptation training that learns your voice over months. It does not have command macros that fire multi-step shortcuts from a single utterance. If your workflow depends on commanding your computer entirely by voice — true hands-free operation, not just text dictation — Dragon remains the better tool, or pair Amical for dictation with a separate voice-command tool like Talon. For text dictation alone, Amical wins on speed, price, and platform support.

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