MacSpeech Dictate 1.5

| | Comments (1)

dictate.jpg
I just received my new copy of MacSpeech Dictate, version 1.5. I have to say that I'm impressed. Although I was not happy about the $50 upgrade fee, the accuracy of the speech recognition is much improved. You can guess of course, that I am typing this using the speech recognition software. So far there have been no errors in recognition.

Yes, this is how it should have been from the very beginning. Now, you can spell out names using the international radio alphabet (foxtrot alpha!). However, I found that this doesn't work perfectly, for example I have to type f-o-x-t-r-o-t a-l-p-h-a because I could not get MacSpeech to recognize when I wanted letters and when I wanted words.

Also, training new words,isn't as easy as Dragon Naturally Speaking. You can't just say "correct that." You have to train new words individually in a separate panel. Also because there is no "correct that" command, it can be frustrating when the speech recognition does actually make a mistake.

The overall verdict so far after my short time testing it is that the basic speech recognition is improved greatly. The ability to add the words is fantastic, although he should have been in the original release. However the inability to correct words on the fly is a huge impediment and limits the ultimate usability of this program.

Overall, I'm glad to see some improvement being made in it, and I hope that they continue to work on further. Perhaps one more release and it will be at the level where Dragon Naturally Speaking was five years ago.

1 Comments

I've since upgraded to Dragon Dictate for the Mac. MacSpeech was bought out by Nuance and renamed the product. The new version is a slight upgrade to MacSpeech Dictate 1.5 but not leaps and bounds -- and certainly not up to par with the Windows versions.

My main complaint these days is that the program can freeze or crash without notice. It's very fragile and I have to learn not to push it too much.

Also, I'm frustrated that it ONLY takes USB connected mics. I really wanted to use my high-end studio mics connected through my M-Audio FireWire Solo, but it won't work. This makes no engineering sense to me. Grrrr.

Leave a comment

New!: You can sign in using your Facebook, Google, OpenID, mixi, Yahoo, MovableType, or other third-party authentication system.


Type the characters you see in the picture above.

Monthly Archives

Sponsored Links

Powered by Movable Type 5.11

Sponsored by

 

Search

Sponsored Links

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Karen Nakamura published on May 28, 2009 4:41 PM.

Digital video camera for the field was the previous entry in this blog.

Queer anthropology at Yale is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

August 2014

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
          1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31