http://www.anysim.net
http://www.bmw-eba.de.tl

I had EXACTLY the same problem. I had even been using the mike/hedset for Skype. Then one day kaput! I called the macspeech dictate people, and as I had it for ess than y year, I was told to buy a new one and return the older one, and that I would be reimbursed under the guarantee. I now have the new one which is working. But I have not used it much, so I hope it will not conk out on me. The problem was I believe the USB adapter… it feels a bit flimsy.
I hope this helps.

Also, can anyone recommend a tutorial? I can dictate, but that is it. I can’t seem to get commands or spelling to work. and my little box with the mice, spell, command icons looks nothing like the ones I’ve seen on websites. Am I missing something?
Thank you.
t

For approximately 5 years I managed a Title I program that developed assistive devices and communication aides. That was many years ago but have blogged and podcast my reviews of Dragon, iListen, Dictate and Windows free voice to speech software from that perspective.

When I look at all these options from that of someone with background in assistive technologies, I see the Microsoft free Speech to Text software the best option for folks needing the kind of control and communications aides you seek. This is one area where Microsoft has more to offer that Apple.

Both Vista and Windows 7 have excellent implementations of this technology. I have posted a number of YouTube how to videos as well.

Let me know if you want me to contact you with specific suggestions.

Cheers
Sam

I too have difficulty with arm muscle pain when trying to type. I still have not purchased Speech Dictate. Which OS X version is your MAc? Sam – above – said it had to be newer than my present 10.4.11 and i am wondering how crucial that is?

I am sorry about the bad experience with Dictate. I agree that for simple dictation (voice entry), it is quite good. However for command and control, I found it lacking.

What version of Dragon Nat Speak were you using? Also, do you still have a PC?

Please let a know if how your search for a solution goes!

- Tomasz

I know this sounds a ridiculous suggestion and you probably have tried it, but my Mac periodically does the same and I’ve found that it definitely refuses to use one of the two USB ports for the microphone. It works fine on one port but not on the other (oddly, it will only recognise my printer if it’s plugged into the other!).

If you have been using a USB hub plugged into the same port, or if you’ve had the Mac set up by someone else and they’ve used just the same port each time, it might be worth trying the other port. I know it sounds really stupid, but sometimes it is silly little things that work.

Good luck with it. I really found MacSpeech Dictate useful, but as you say, for text only – I gave up trying to use it for anything else.

Have you explored the Mac’s own built-in Voice Commands? They are probably the best thing I’ve found for navigating round the Mac – go to System Prefs, go to Speech and turn it on. I have mine set up with the keyword ‘computer’ so I don’t have to press a key, and also if you dig around and explore it, you can write new voice commands for any keyboard shortcut. If you dig around further in the Mac, it turns out you can write your own voice commands which means you can create a LOT of useful voice commands.
Because it’s a limited vocabulary, it recognises it really well. It solves the need for hands to move between programmes (“computer, switch to Firefox”) and in some you can really whizz about (“computer, close this Firefox tab”, “computer, press return”).

Good luck

laura

But worse, it stopped recognizing my microphone. I”ve tried 3 different mics, besides the one it came with. Eventually it will tell me my mic isn’t plugged in. No matter how much I reboot, unplug, etc… it says I have no mic and I can’t move on.

I can’t believe that I can’t find a solution. I’m thousands of dollars in the hole and not terribly technically inclined. Does anyone out there know of a way a computer user with limited hand use can be functional on a computer? I don’t have financial resources like someone famous like Stephen Hawking…

I’m in San Diego and would pay someone to help me get these things working, but haven’t had any luck with the people I’ve tried so far. The mac store won’t support non-Mac products, and I haven’t met many people who are functional in either product.

I’m devastated! I just want my life back and without being able to use a computer it seems unlikely I’ll be able to work again. Anyone????

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