I recently bought MacSpeech Dictate in order to help with the writing of my next book, Crazy in Japan (working title). Unfortunately, the program crashed everytime I tried to setup a new profile.
A couple of hours of googling seemed to suggest that the problem was with the English Data Disk, but various attempts to get a clean data disk revealed that that was likely not the problem.
A post on MacFixitForums by yfried helped me narrow it down:
There are several possible causes for this error: 1) having FileVault turned on 2) punctuation marks, symbols, foreign language characters, or high ASCII characters in the name of the hard drive 3) punctuation marks, symbols, foreign language characters, or high ASCII characters in the userid used to login to the Macintosh 4) punctuation marks, symbols, foreign language characters, or high ASCII characters in the name of the voice profile (depending on when this error appears) 5) a network set up where the user's home folder is located on a server 6) having more than one hard drive installed in the Macintosh which has the same name (Apple ships multiple drive systems with all drives being the same name figuring that users will change the appropriate drive names) from: http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum36&Number=853106&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=31&fpart=1
In my case, I used Japanese characters in my full username in my login which screwed things up. Changing it from 中村かれん to Karen Nakamura fixed it and allowed me to set up my user profile.
This is very poor programming on MacSpeech's part, in my opinion. Mac OS X programs should be character set independent. It's 2008 for heaven's sake!
More on how MacSpeech Dictate actually is after I've used it for a while.
Update April 17: This is the first test of some dictation in MacSpeech. I am actually quite impressed with how it is doing. All I did right before this, was the standard voice training which only took about five minutes. I am using the standard USB Plantronics headset which came with MacSpeech Dictate.
Update April 18: I've been using MacSpeech Dictate to write out some e-mails this morning. It's fine for conversational details but the most annoying thing is that I cannot add any new words to the vocabularies such as the name of colleagues or students, all of whom have very odd spellings. I can hardly wait for the next update which should have a spelling mode.
The other annoying thing is that the automatically update feature seems to be broken. I cannot update past version 1.0.0 even though there is a version 1.0.1. I've e-mailed support for help, we will see what happens.
Update April 20: Although the MacSpeech website says that there is a 1.0.1 update, apparently it was revoked. So version 1.0.0 is the latest release. See this thread for more info: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.apps/browse_thread/thread/d1092f2abfe3b136#
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