30 seconds dictation time limit? Seriously?

Yep, it's about 30-45 seconds limit.

It's not really meant for much else than giving commands. 'Dictation' is both a bit of a misnomer, and a bit of a gimmick, really. You can only hope the whole point of having it run over a server is that there's a team busting a gut trying to improve the parsing algorithm so that one day we have a real voice-to-text.app.

Wouldn't hold my breath on that, though!

Misnomer is an understatement! Look, I get the 30 sec limit in such an early generation of the software, but erasing (i.e. not transcribing to text) the previous 30-45 seconds of speech should you let the app "timeout" is a big problem. Why have me start dictating an email if after 30 seconds I don't press the "stop" button it's going to disregard everything I've just said?

Hey Apple: this alienates the users of the Dictation software by making us feel stupid and angry for talking (and sometimes repeating ourselves) to a computer that does abosolutely nothing with the speech.

I've taken to setting my Mac's clock to display the seconds so I know when to press stop when I use Dictation.

You can make suggestions on how to improve its features here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

I get the impression that the Dictation feature is primarily for Messages. I cannot imagine any server/internet-reliant model would ever be nearly as efficient as a local option such as Dragon.