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The decision has raised eyebrows as the company was one of Apple's high profile guests at last year's Worldwide Developer's Conference: then, Apple boss, Steve Jobs, opened his keynote address by inviting Dragon CEO, Janet Baker, on stage to proclaim her company's renewed commitment to the Mac.

At the time Dragon promised to ship Naturally Speaking for the Mac by the end of last year. And at last November's Comdex computer show, the company demonstrated a working version of the product.

But now Dragon has changed its mind: 'We will be evaluating this decision again for Mac OS X. However, a decision will not be made until OS X is available for testing,' it said in a letter to Mac beta

'The reality is that with the existing [Mac] OS, you cannot put out a system that has comparable quality in terms of features, characteristics and so forth to what is out on the Windows platform,' said Baker. 'We simply don't think that is satisfactory for Mac users. We want to be able to put out the highest quality system possible on the Mac'.

Dragon said that it wants any release to be a full-featured, large vocabulary, continuous speech recognition system: 'The issue is that there are constraints on the present operating system that are supposed to be addressed in OS X...Until you have a finished OS, you can't be sure of about exactly where the limits are...We are very hopeful that with OS X we will not be hobbled by these,' said Baker.

One constraint for Dragon has been the inability to dictate directly into applications in the way that IBM's ViaVoice product performs. 'We know that constraint is not very satisfactory to users,' Baker said. 'We're continuing to work [on a Mac OS X version], but the reality is that until we have a full evaluation we're not going to promise that we can bring out something that will be fully featured until we know for sure it can be done...It's not for lack of effort, but we didn't want to put out a second rate system.'