Talking to your Mac: Ars reviews MacSpeech Dictate 1.2

Link to article review: click here

I'm not a Mac user. I'm aware that they're better and more efficient, but I am extremely comfortable using a PC with Windows (despite its many many flaws), and I'm not really in the mood to learn a new OS. At least not in the near future.

Anyway, good news for people who are Mac users! Remember MacSpeech Dictate thata came out about a half a year ago? And those annoying (and more importantly, unfixable) drawbacks it had? Apple fixed them. The admitted that they knew the program had some minor issues and that they would irritate the hell out of customers who actually needed the product, but they figured there was no point in waiting six months and working out the glitches when peopled needed the product then. So now, if you already bought Dictate,then you can go ahead and upgrade, for free, to MacSpeech Dictate 1.2! And if you didn't buy it already, it's probably a pretty good investment, according to Ars Technica.

The favorite new feature for the program is that users can now train the program to suit their vocabulary and speech patterns. If you speak a word that the computer either mistakes for another or decides that you haven't spoken a real word at all, you can choose to edit the recognition of that word, and in the future, (hopefully) the program will recognize the new word. Take for example the name of the company that wrote the review. According to the authors of the review, "after a couple attempts, Dictate [became] a champ at recognizing "Ars Technica."

Also, the new version includes the option of being able to dictate to the program hen it has gotten a word wrong. Also, it allows users to spell out words letter-by-letter in case the program doesn't understand or recognize a word. A drawback to this feature, however, is that in order to switch from speech mode to spelling mode, you have to dictate to the program when you are doing so. In the grand scheme of things, it's not such a huge problem, but it is annoying when you end up repetitively losing your train of thought because you keep having to say "spelling mode" or "dictation mode."

Another flaw in the program is that if you try to switch to typing during the middle of your dictation, the program gets all sorts of mixed up and doesn't understand at all what you're trying to do.

Overall, it's definitely a good upgrade from the original MacSpeech Dictate that was released the first time around, as it corrects its major flaws. It's a great choice for Mac users looking for a basic speech recognition program.

Or, you could just buy Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a speech recognition program that runs on both Macs and PC's and that ranks much higher and as more advanced. Just sayin'.