MacSpeech Dictate: Macworld Best of Show
Macs are great when it comes to talking, the built in VoiceOver utility ships with over 20 voices, and controls including rate, pitch, and volume. VoiceOver can assist vision impaired users in understanding exactly what’s taking place on their computer, and be useful to anyone that just wants something read to them aloud instead of having to do the reading. But instead of listening to your Mac, what if you want to talk to your Mac?
That question is now answered by MacSpeech Dictate, a program that was introduced just this week at Macworld, and which has already won one of the conference’s prestigious Best of Show awards.
MacSpeech states that after just 5 minutes of voice training, Dictate is capable of up to 99% accuracy. It can accept voice commands to perform various functions such as navigating the Mac, opening programs, and printing. MacSpeech Dictate can also be used to dictate anything from a note to a novel. It also intelligently recognizes the difference between commands and dictation, making the user experience easier and more productive.
Apple certainly seems pleased with this commercial enhancement to VoiceOver. "Apple’s commitment to accessibility is evident throughout Mac OS X, including such ground-breaking features as VoiceOver, our built-in screen reader," said Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "We’re delighted that Mac OS X users now have access to advanced speech-to-text dictation technology from MacSpeech, which nicely complements VoiceOver."
MacSpeech Dictate requires a recent version of the Mac operating system, either OS X Tiger 10.4.11 or OS X Leopard 10.5. Dictate will be priced starting at $199, and is expected to ship by February 15th. Registered customers of iListen (a previous MacSpeech product that will be discontinued when Dictate ships) will be able to purchase Dictate at the upgrade price of $99. Those who purchased iListen in 2008 can “crossgrade” to Dictate for $29 through April15th, just in time to speak commands to your tax preparation software.
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This is a nice tool, but oddly doesn't a tool like this getting best of MacWorld demonstrate that the price of Vista is well justified?
If the Vista voice recognition was as limited as the built in OSX voice recognition, this would be a wash, but Vista's voice recognition steps up to be competitive or better than premium products like this available for OS X.
Did the Tech Journalism world totally miss the whole Vista Speech Recognition Articles and kudos in place of nagging MS for a 10% performance loss in games with January 07 Video drivers? Especially now that Vista is beating XP in gaming performance with current drivers...
I love the 'feature' articles, but Vista got very little interest in the features it did offer and instead people focused on comparing performance to XP istead.
For example, how about the fact that Business and Ulitmate offer a 'better than time machine' backup feature with volume copies and backup copies presented in the 'previous versions UI', yet the industry never talked about this in Vista, and when OS X time machine came out, which lacks features in comparison to Vista in this area got all the Buzz..