For more than eight years I’ve been working with dictation software in one way or another.\u00c2\u00a0 Mostly I’ve been working with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but I’ve given ViaVoice and more recently MacSpeech iListen a try.<\/p>\n
Dragon is without question the standard against which all the rest are measured.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m currently on version 8 (David Pogue indicated that version 9 wasn’t worth the upgrade if you have 8 ), and it’s just about perfect.\u00c2\u00a0 I do have corrections but they are few, and I’m surprised by how accurate the program is even when I’m speaking quickly.<\/p>\n
My only complaint about Dragon is that it’s a Windows application.\u00c2\u00a0 As anyone in the liaison group can tell you, I live on my Mac.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t have anything in particular against Windows – some of my best friends use Windows.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually there are three things I can only do on a PC:<\/p>\n
Someday I hope Microsoft makes Entourage work with Exchange.\u00c2\u00a0 Someday I hope Apple makes a tablet.\u00c2\u00a0 Someday I hope someone makes dictation software that works as well on a Mac as Dragon NaturallySpeaking does on my tablet.<\/p>\n
Recently I purchased iListen from MacSpeech.\u00c2\u00a0 If I could have a reliable speech-to-text program on my Mac, I could avoid bringing two computers home most weekends.<\/p>\n
I’ve had plenty of luck finding applications on the Mac.\u00c2\u00a0 OmniGraffle takes the place of Visio, BBEdit replaces Visual SlickEdit, Pages beats Publisher, Keynote beats PowerPoint, and so on.<\/p>\n
David Pogue at the New York Times recently wrote about iListen as a side note in his review of NaturallySpeaking 9<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s a dedicated Mac user – if you haven’t seen his TEDTalks presentation about Microsoft, Apple and design<\/a>, you should.\u00c2\u00a0 But David has stuck with Dragon over the years because it’s better than anything else.<\/p>\n As Pogue notes, iListen isn’t nearly as accurate or as elegant as NaturallySpeaking.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve done more than 30 minutes of training and I continue to have errors in almost every sentence.\u00c2\u00a0 I haven’t given up, though.\u00c2\u00a0 I correct what needs correcting, despite a correction interface that is not intuitive.\u00c2\u00a0 Even with corrections I continue to have accuracy problems.<\/p>\n What’s most frustrating is that iListen essentially requires you to use your headset or the mouse, but not both.\u00c2\u00a0 The program tries to remember where the cursor is in the document as it works.\u00c2\u00a0 That makes no sense to me.\u00c2\u00a0 Ultimately I get to a point in every document where I find i have to reach for the mouse to fix an error that I can’t get the program to select, thus ending my voice transcription attempt.<\/p>\n I’m not giving up!\u00c2\u00a0 In some ways I feel as if iListen performs today as NaturallySpeaking did five or six years ago.\u00c2\u00a0 Given time, I hope to see MacSpeech develop iListen into a truly useable application.<\/p>\n Or perhaps if I’m lucky, the makers of NaturallySpeaking will create a Mac version now that the hardware is Intel-based.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Technorati Tags: iListen<\/a>, Mac<\/a>, NaturallySpeaking<\/a>, Windows<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For more than eight years I’ve been working with dictation software in one way or another.\u00c2\u00a0 Mostly I’ve been working with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but I’ve given ViaVoice and more recently MacSpeech iListen a try. Dragon is without question the standard … Continue reading