Wednesday, August 06, 2008

MacSpeech

I recently made the move over to an iMac from a P.C. and am amazed at all the differences. Granted, transferring from Windows OS to Leopard is "interesting" enough, I've found that numerous applications that I took for granted are either lacking the same punch or are absent. However, I find blogging to be much simpler on the Mac due to all the editing programs and accessibility of keyboard shortcuts and command options. It has been a process trying to locate a satisfactory dictation program.

I had been considering picking up Dragon Naturally Speaking for my P.C. due to all the great reviews I've read over the last few months, but I was upset to see that it is unavailable for my new OS. After doing a bit of research, I was able to find a couple of great programs out there that are compatible for my new OS. Out of the two, I found one from Nuance, the developers of Dragon Naturally Speaking, entitled MacSpeech.


MacSpeech looks to be the frontrunner right now, so I'm going to take it for a test drive in the near future.



4 comments:

thechuck said...

Actually, MacSpeech is the name of the company that has licensed the Dragon speech recognition engine from Nuance, who does not develop any applications for Mac OS X.

MacSpeech is the name of the company, "MacSpeech Dictate" is the name of the program.

Unknown said...

thechuck is correct. Apple scrapped their former voice engine in January and replaced it with Dragon Naturally Speeking's engine.

The real question is whether or not MacSpeech will get an upgrade to their engine this month, as Nuance releases Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 to replace DNS9, which was about a year and a half old already when Apple finally incorporated the technology into MacSpeech

thechuck said...

Actually, Apple itself has nothing to do with this. MacSpeech is a separate company from Apple. Apple has their own speech recognition technology, called "English Speech Recognition," which is for commands only (not dictation). Apple did not replace their engine with the Nuance engine.

Also, the engine currently being used by MacSpeech is the Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 engine. They were given a head start on it while work on NaturallySpeaking 10 for PC was ongoing.

Unknown said...

Very cool.