I am looking for local opinions on either ViaVoice by IBM, iListen by Apple, or Naturally Speaking from Dragon Systems (running it through Virtual PC !!!***) in order to make a move on one of these programs. Which club member(s) should I consult at a monthly club meeting? Or is there any forums that have recently debated this question? I am also interested in investing on any conference/lecture on the subject.
I use Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) on a PC and it is phenomenal once you have trained it. David Pogue, well known Mac author, actually keeps a PC to use for DNS when writing his columns. If you search back through his articles on line, you should be able to find the one where he recommends it. Not sure how well it works on VPC, but it is very processor intensive.
Hi vidoc,
Hopefully someone with first-hand experience with ViaVoice or iListen on a Mac will respond, but going _only_ by online reports, neither Mac package, ViaVoice nor iListen, is reported to perform as well as the currently PC-only, Dragon NaturallySpeaking package. As Neil points out, even David Pogue, a prolific Mac journalist, uses Dragon NaturallySpeaking running on a PC, to dictate the text of his Mac books. When I last looked into this, ViaVoice had not been updated for some time, making iListen the only Mac solution for OS X 10.4.
Note that regardless of which package you go with, you'd want to consider getting a microphone recommended for your specific package, as the performance of speech-recognition programs in general tends to be sensitive to the microphone used. The idea of using Dragon NaturallySpeaking under Virtual PC on a Mac is an interesting one, but the microphone issue is another reason, in addition to performance, that I'd definitely want to research first. If I were in urgent need of the best speech transcription abilities available today, I'd be tempted to consider a low-cost, headless-PC and control it with VNC or other screen-sharing software from my mac, as a speech-recognition-only appliance. But perhaps an iListen-user will post positive feedback, or the Mac speech transcription options will improve in 2006!
best of luck,
...ben
Hi vidoc,
Just came across this post which is kinda appropriate to this thread:
Bill Gates' predictions about speech recognition: a historical review 1997-2005
http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2005/12/30/gates
all the best,
...ben