Can’t beat the price either.

Macspeech:
I had a lot of trouble installing it. And training the German user did not work at all at first, training the English one worked well.
I trained vocab into both and fed them with my own texts – that seems to have helped accuracy a lot. It is starting to translate into text really fluently. BUT
each morning when I start out, it does not understand *at all*. When I do a microphone-setup and train some vocab for 40 mins or so, then it starts to transcribe fluently.
I spent hours each day for the past week, feeding my own texts and vocab-training into Macspech.
BUT when I look at the user profile-files (the ones you are supposed to backup) only the English one is changed. The German one is still dating from end of October 08. EVEN if I trained it that day and clicked “save profile”.
Any experience with this?
I am having a very bad suspicion that the app works so badly each morning because it “forgets” my training and I start from scratch each day. o.O

MacSpeech does well in overall accuracy but is dead last in usability and mixed keyboard / voice editing. I suspect you would be very frustrated trying to use Dictate to edit text. Nuance has entered the Apple market with an iPhone app so keeping fingers crossed they will use their considerable resources to replace the MacSpeech product with one fully engineered by Nuance.

I always re-try Dictate after an update, get excited and then find it still is not the productivity enhancement tool that Vista Speech is. It occupies hard drive space but is almost never used.

This is really nasty.

Sad. I really had hoped they could pull it off. No reliable speech to text for my Mac yet. Will continue to use Vista Speech still, oddly enough, the best speech to text product around. A true jewel Microsoft has allowed to go all but unnoticed.

Cheers
Sam
Windows2Apples

I used to be able to use Dictate to (slowly) get out my translations when my fingers were too tired to type. Dictating with Dictate is slower than typing because of the frequent need to correct errors. But now I find Dictate totally useless. Note that I use it almost exclusively with the setting tilted towards “accuracy”. That clearly doesn’t help.

In fact, the dictate screen sometimes types things backwards. They claim to be “fixing” the problem. Grammatically, it also seems to make very dumb choices, choosing the wrong homonym in cases where the syntax should make the correct word obvious.

It works OK if you are dictating mindless drivel for an email, but anything serious or technical will cause Dictate to fall apart. And, no matter what you do, always dictate into a buffer application like Text Edit and copy paragraphs or sentences over to the main document. Otherwise, when Dictate goes berserk, which it often does, previous text can get messed up pretty badly.

I continue to use Vista Speech because it is so much easier to make reliable corrections. Mind you, more corrections are needed because is in not as accurate as MacSpeech but only marginally so. I had very high hopes the new release would work for me but can’t deal with the funky lost cursor issue.

I had planned to use it for my thesis but then didn’t. If I had a copy from a torrent site to test before buying then maybe that would have convinced me that the bugs were something minor. You may want to email the company to see if any fixes have been released.

Should I buy this?

I spent 2007 basically “armless” due to spinal problems and if I live to be a hundred, I never EVER want to have to use iListen again – but is MacSpeech Dictate’s current version (this is February 09) worth buying?

I’m on a 3-yr-old iBook G4 on OS X, trying to get most of a 90,000-word doctoral thesis from head to screen in Microsoft Word. I can type for about half an hour twice a day which is going to take quite a long time to type a thesis, really…

I need advice, guys! Some are saying “wondrous!”, some are saying “bugs and more bugs!” and meanwhile I have no income to spare, two dodgy arms and a thesis to write…

Laura

Most spoken conversation is way too fast for any speech recognition. Unless you’re recording with the pacing you need for speech recognition to work, you’ve got some audio editing to do, to have a chance of getting a transcript.

So, if you’re having the hassles listed on this forum, try using a USB headset (the one they provide in the box has a USB adaptor!!).

It would be nice of them to tell you all of this, seeing as how big a problem it is. Just a note in the box, boys!

You’ll probably have a tough time with that. Speech recognition relies heavily on pacing & pauses.

I installed Dictate yesterday, and tested it while recording a podcast with Audacity, using Soundflower and the “Software Playthrough” feature (look in Audio I/O prefs) on Audacity.

I first had to set up a profile with Soundflower (2ch) as the audio device, but Software Playthrough made that work just fine. I was able to read the text in the Dictate window into Audacity, and Dictate picked it all up seamlessly.

Simultaneous recording of the podcast along with transcription worked just fine using a Dictate notepad, but playing back older podcasts through Soundflower seemed to give Dictate more than it could handle.

Adding approx. 5 seconds of silence at the beginning & end of the audio file and adding a couple seconds of silence every 30 seconds or so, appears to improve the results so far.

Dictate worked well enough that I will be able to generate transcripts with about the same amount of editing time as I spend with my transcription service’s output.

Next test is the “analog” one – podcast playing through speakers next to the mike.

So far, Dictate has been far and away the best speech recognition software I’ve used, and I’m now just one good Mac app away from retiring my (virtual) PC for good. Anyone know a good replacement for EDGE Diagrammer?

I have given up on it and now use Vista Speech exclusively. I am taking an inexpensive Vista laptop (<$600) on a trip and spent 15 minutes training the free Speech software and it is almost as accurate as my Dragon 9.5. (P.S. Using a cheap ($20) headset and internal sound chip … no expensive USB audio interface needed.

Hopefully MacSpeech has the resources to follow through in these difficult times.
Sam
Windows2Apples

MacSpeech Dictate is the worst software purchase I’ve made in recent memory, and I will never buy from them again. Their customer service is a joke, particularly when compared to so many other Mac developers that I really enjoy working with.