Periodically writing something involving art, cooking, gardening, tech/gadgets, or dreaded evil cats.

MacSpeech Dictate

August 21st, 2008 Posted in Reviews, Technology

Something I’ve always wanted since I was a kid was the ability to talk to a computer and have it type saying. I’ve seen the speech recognition software since its early stages on the Windows environment.  I also remember speakable phrases for the Macintosh environment. Based upon what I experienced, I just didn’t believe that it would be very accurate.  Cost was also a prohibitive point when considering buying speech recognition software.  I didn’t want to pay a large amount of money for something that didn’t work that well. So, I decided to sit this one out until I knew the technology had gotten better. It has.

I had heard about Dictate winning an award earlier this year. It reminded me to get an update on what was out there with regard to speech recognition software. Basically, on the Windows front things had matured but there was one standout program. That program is Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Unfortunately, it is not available for the Macintosh operating system. That changed, when the company MacSpeech licensed the software engine behind Dragon NaturallySpeaking for their Dictate software. Obviously, Dictate is a program written for the Macintosh operating system.

As typical with most software when it’s first released, there will be bugs. So I decided to sit this one out for just a couple months until the release bugs were ironed out. Well, I just got it tonight.

The package comes with a Plantronics microphone headset that easily hooked into a USB port on my iMac.   The installation process was fairly easy. After a little bit of training, I’ve jumped right into trying to use the software is much is possible.  Guessing at my accuracy rate right now I probably need to do some more training so that it can understand me better. But I am very VERY impressed. This entire blog entry was done with minimal editing involving a keyboard. If you’ve always wanted to talk to your computer and have it type what you’re saying the software is out there to do it.

I am seriously beside myself that this actually works.

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