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MacSpeech Dictate
Welcome to the brand new MacSpeech Dictate, the premier speech recognition solution for the Macintosh. Written from the ground up for the Mac, MacSpeech Dictate’s features, accuracy, and capabilities make it as fun, productive, and intuitive to use as the Mac itself. MacSpeech Dictate will astonish you with its accuracy. You simply talk and leave the recognition to MacSpeech Dictate.
Instead of using your mouse to select menu commands or your keyboard to type shortcuts, just speak a command. MacSpeech Dictate executes it for you. What could be easier? Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and on, and on MacSpeech Dictate works perfectly with them all. And MacSpeech Dictate works great with Apple’s applications as well, including iChat, Mail, iPhoto, Keynote, and more.
At the core of MacSpeech Dictate is the world-renowned speech recognition engine, Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It’s the brains and brawn behind MacSpeech Dictate’s phenomenal accuracy capabilities. MacSpeech Dictate includes everything you need to be instantly productive as soon as start using it, including a high quality headphone/microphone unit.
Average Customer Rating:
4 out of 5
Rating Snapshot
(4 reviews)
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1
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4 of 4 (100%) customers would recommend this product to a friend.
Ordering Information
Price:
$ 188.95
Status: Ships Today
Quantity:
Customer Reviews for MacSpeech Dictate
Reviews & Ratings for MacSpeech Dictate
Mac Enthusiast
Overall Rating:
45
Performance:
45
Ease of Use:
45
Great purchase! Really Helps!
Date: May 21, 2009
Written By:
rolsonercFrom: California
Owned this Product for:
0-3 Months
Level of Expertise:
Good
Reviews & Ratings for MacSpeech Dictate I bought this product because I do not type very well, so I needed software that would take dictation. Well, MacSpeech lived up to my expectations and has really helped me. In fact, I am using Dictate to write this review. The accuracy is very good and the time it took to learn it was minimal. I would recommend this product for anyone who does not type.
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Review 2 for MacSpeech Dictate
Top 100 Contributor
Mac Enthusiast
Overall Rating:
45
Performance:
55
Ease of Use:
45
Great Product
Date: April 4, 2009
Written By:
wdwilliamFrom: Dallas, TX
Owned this Product for:
0-3 Months
Level of Expertise:
Average
Reviews & Ratings for MacSpeech Dictate Takes some time getting used to the commands and allowing the application to learn you're style of speech. The application does work as advertised, and makes typing a breeze.
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Review 3 for MacSpeech Dictate
Top 500 Contributor
Mac Enthusiast
Overall Rating:
55
Performance:
55
Ease of Use:
55
Didn't believe it
Date: March 27, 2009
Written By:
LeeroiFrom: Bozeman, MT
Owned this Product for:
0-3 Months
Level of Expertise:
Good
Pros: text translation
Reviews & Ratings for MacSpeech Dictate While it is not perfect, and it will not understand you like another person (the documentation states this as well), I was floored to find out just how well the voice dictation worked.
With the 5 minute tutorial, I was able to read aloud a written piece and yes, it was better than 98% accurate. Even things like "wear" vs "where" came through flawlessly. I was able to do this the first night of using it. Even punctuation (commas, peroid, quotation marks, etc.) were a piece of cake and always were accurate. I have zero complaints on the speech-to-text part of the program.
The only part i had trouble grasping quickly (OK - instantly...) was navigating and commands. The program has a wide variety of things you can do or control besides just translating speech into text, and that was harder. The commands used were less intuitive, but worked just fine once I knew what they were. Selecting text ("Select the last five words") was much more sketchy, but I think I was at that point (what - 20 minutes in to it??!?) somewhat jaded and expected it to work like a live human being. It practically read my mind so well on text translation I was disappointed that it didn't do everything so well. I ended up using the mouse to do the mechanical things (copy, paste, select text, manually correct spelling or punctuation, etc.) even though the software says this confuses the program more than using the voice commands.
Bottom line: text translation is amazing for me - my daughter had a harder time but within 20 minutes i was easily getting better than 98% accuracy and it was really fast.... Selecting text, using the commands (you have to change 'modes'), and what not was more problematic for me but I think with regular practice it would get easier. You have to say exactly the right thing for the software to recognize a command, whereas in text, it has a lot more forgiveness.
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Review 4 for MacSpeech Dictate
Overall Rating:
35
Performance:
45
Ease of Use:
45
A Good Start
Date: October 9, 2008
Written By:
EKWicksFrom: Washington DC
Reviews & Ratings for MacSpeech Dictate If you really want to use a speech recognition program with your Macintosh without resorting to using the Mac in Windows mode, MacSpeech Dictate is essentially the only realistic option. (Note, however, that the program is compatible only with Intel-based Macs.) And if your main concern is being able to dictate with few recognition errors, MacSpeech performs very well.
I have used three speech recognition programs: ViaVoice and iListen for the Mac, and Dragon Naturally Speaking for Windows. ViaVoice was just okay but became unusable when it ceased to be supported to be compatible with lalter versions of the Mac operating system. I found iListen, the previous product marketed by the MacSpeech people, to be essentially unusable because it made so many speech-recognition errors, even after several weeks of trying to teach it to recognize my voice. As is widely known, Dragon Naturally Speaking is an excellent program except for the fact that it cannot be used within the Mac operating system.
MacSpeech Dictate brings usable speech recognition back to the Mac platform. Because it uses the Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech engine, it makes few speech-recognition errors. On my first generation Mac book Pro, its speed is entirely acceptable. it takes only a few minutes to train the program to recognize your voice, and its quick to be up and running. It seems to work well in all the programs in which I have tried to use it.
The problem with the program is that it is essentially unfinished. There is no practical way to teach it words that are not in its vocabulary or that it incorrectly recognizes, and it lacks many of the other refinements that one finds in Dragon. it has some features that I find particularly irritating; for example, the window pane that shows all of the available speech commands takes up about a third of the available screen real estate on my Mac. It can be hidden, but the only way to do that is to go back to the speech recognition program, when there should just be a button to select on the commands pane itself to close it. I have also found that when I have the MacSpeech application open and then switch to using other programs without employing MacSpeech for a while, it sometimes will not work, and I am forced to restart it. Unplugging the microphone to free up a USB interface has the same effect.
Despite these deficiencies and irritations, MacSpeech is a very usable program because it does very well its basic job of converting the spoken word to text on the computer while making few speech-recognition errors.
I understand that the people who produce MacSpeech intend to bring out another version soon that will correct some of the current deficiencies. I was also told that the upgrade will be available without charge to those who bought the original version.
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