I was an early adopter of speech recognition. Despite being a long time Apple user user, in 1999 I purchased my first PC just to run Dragon Naturally Speaking. I would dictate to the PC and then copy the dictated files over to my Mac on a thumb drive! Dragon Naturally Speaking was by far the best dictation software but it was not available for the Appel platform.

Not too long later, Viavoice arrived on the Macintosh. It was not as good as Dragon but did the job. I  used IBM ViaVoice for the next 6 years, with a brief but disappointing trial of iListen in the middle of that time.

So I’ve been waiting for almost 10 years for Dragon NaturallySpeaking to arrive on the Macintosh!  And finally it’s here –  Macspeech Dictate.

‘At the core of MacSpeech Dictate is the world-renowned speech recognition engine, Dragon NaturallySpeaking.’

After using Macspeech Dictate since it’s release 2 years ago,  I can say MacSpeech Dictate is easily the best dictation software for the Mac. It is now up to version 1.5 and with each new release it keeps getting better. For those who for many years were limping along with iListen or Via Voice – you won’t believe the difference! The latest version of Macspeech Dictate achieves almost full accuracy with just 5-10 minutes of training.

There are a few (small) weaknesses. One is that every time it boots up you need to click to select your voice profile –  it doesn’t  have a default option.

Another weakness is that although the accuracy seems on par with Dragon naturally speaking,  the learning as you dictate is not quite as good.  With Dragon NaturallySpeaking  if I retrained a word it would never mistake it again.  I could even retrain it with words that I pronounced  badly,  so that it would  learn my bad pronunciation.  With  Macspeech  Dictate sometimes I have to retrain a difficult word five or six times and even then it doesn’t learn it  exactly how I said it – thinks.  So there must be some difference between the way Dragon Naturally Speaking and Macspeech Dictate  handle the retraining of words.

That said,  it’s a fantastic product. I use it every day,  and I’d totally recommend that you try it out if you do a lot of typing.  At the very least find a friend who has a copy and give it a trial! That’s what I did  10 years ago with Dragon Naturally Speaking and I was hooked.

If you live in the US It’s available directly from MacSpeech for $199, or people from Australia can grab it from Amazon who ship internationally.

There’s also a wireless version for $299 but if you really want the absolute best option, I’d go for the standard Macspeech Dictate version and buy your own separate top of the line wireless headset - I have written a separate article here on the best microphone to buy.

NOTE: You can read my  older and less flattering reviews of the earlier versions of Macspeech Dictate here.

There was a knock on the door at 10 past 8 this morning – it was the Snow Leopard delivery man. I live in Dubbo, NSW, 6 hours drive from Sydney. Snow Leopard arrived on my doorstep at 10 past 8! I can’t believe Apple’s efficiency!

Install was a breeze, took 45 minutes. I did the default install which installed it over my existing system – 10.5.8.

Computer restarted and I was greeted with the Welcome to Macintosh screen.

Everything seemed quite similar, except one of my two monitors was brighter – the gamma settings must have changed.

Some observations:

When I launched Photoshop CS I was presented with a dialog box saying I needed to install rosetta:

Rosetta is a program that allows the new Snow Leopard on an Intel Macintosh to run old programs. I installed it and and my old Photoshop CS works. So does my old copy of Microsoft Office 2004. Happy about that.

When I first opened mail it asked if I wanted to update/import my existing mail accounts. My heart sank for a while I thought I’d lost all my mails, but it just did some kind of import that took about 3 seconds and all my emails and settings were there.

The most trouble was with Pages. Opened Pages 08 and all my documents were blank! Same with Keynote 08. O dear…

I rang Apple support, here’s one of the great things about Apple – even though my Mac Pro is out of warranty, I get 90 days of FREE phone support with Snow Leopard – not bad for $39!

Apple took about 5 seconds to answer the phone, and about 5 minutes to diagnose and fix the problem. Apparently my automatic software update was confused and I had an old version of Pages 08 (3.0) still there. Upgraded to 3.03 and it was all fixed.

1Password told me it needed to upgrade itself to work with Snow Leopard. It upgraded itself and it works as promised.

Screen Shots instead of being named ‘Picture 1′, ‘Picture 2′ are now named Screenshot followed by the date and time they were taken.

Quicktime has been updated form 7 to 10. QT10 has the familiar share to menu to share straight to Youtube, iTunes or mobile me. THe bad news is that QT10 can’t cut and paste like Quicktime pro could – good thing I still have QT 7. The good news is that it can trim movies (cut off the front and back) straight out of the box without having to upgrade to QT pro.

The only software I have found that won’t work is Macspeech Dictate – a bit disappointing.

Actually I just upgraded and it works, but the upgrade is almost $100 – a good cashcow for Macspeech. I went to their site but couldn’t see any option apart from a paid upgrade.

Overall Snow Leopard works well and things seem to be a bit zippier in the finder and Safari. I’m not blown away by it yet. My mac pro is not real stable, applications crash a couple of times a day, and Snow Leopard has shown no improvement on that. It used to be pages that was crashing the most, but now it’s Macspeech dictate.

UPDATE: Just noticed that my canon imagerunner IR5000 printer DOES NOT WORK with Snow Leopard – and from what I can see there are no drivers for it at this stage. Very disappointing. This is something to be aware of. Thankfully I have a HP8150 that works fine.

UPDATE: Canon have released drivers that will allow you to print to your Image Runner. Download them from here. When you add the Printer, select IP Printer and LPD Daemon, select GEneric Postscript Printer. It doesn’t see all the options like different trays, but it does print at least.

I have  previously reviewed MacSpeech Dictate but here are some tips on how to use it well.

MICROPHONE SETUP

The software itself is fairly simple to use and it takes you through all the necessary setup,  but I found one of the most important things in achieving good recognition was to have a consistent microphone setup.  I have tried various microphones,  headset,  handheld,  and while there is some small difference between the microphones,  is more important that whatever the microphone you have, you use it consistently.

By consistently I mean  speak with the same tone of voice,  speak exactly the same distance from the microphone each time you use the software,  and speak using the same volume.

For  while I was using a handheld wireless SM58  to dictate into the computer and I found  that when I used it properly,  keeping it about 10 mm from my mouth, this achieved the greatest accuracy of any of the microphones I have used. But  it became a bit unusable in that I had to hold my hand up to my mouth all the time and keep my head exactly the right distance from it.  If I spoke a bit further away the accuracy would drop.

Now  I use a headset microphone – a Samson airline QV. The advantage  is that each time I clip it onto my head the microphone is exactly the same distance from my mouth.  I can walk around the room, tilt my head,  looked different directions, and the microphone stays consistently the same distance from my mouth,  resulting in excellent recognition.

I use the SAMSON QV10e wireless headset mic.

The SAMSON QV wireless headset mic is designed as a vocal microphone for drummers so it has excellent background noise rejection. You can buy them from ebay or from any music store.

Andrea Pure Audio USB adapter

The wireless mic has an Audio out cable that is plugged into into an Andrea USB audio adapter into the USB port of my Mac. You’ll need a mono 6.5mm to stereo 3.5mm lead to do this, available at any electronics store. Probably any good quality USB audio adapter would do – griffin imic etc, but I went for the best – the Andrea one, and it was about $60.

I can now dictate as I walk around the room using my wireless headset. The accuracy with the SAMSON microphone is incredible. Note that you have to re-train the software if you change microphones.

My suggestion would be to buy the basic Macspeech dictate with the built in microphone and get used to using it.

Then if you decide you want to go hand-free, get a SAMSON QV headset and go wireless!

TRAINING THE SOFTWARE

The  built-in training of Mac speech dictate is excellent.  You read into the computer  for about 5 to 10 minutes and it learns from your voice.

My first suggestion is to  discipline yourself to dictate into the Mac speech Dictate application itself  for a week or two,  taking the opportunity to train every word that the computer mis-recognises,  so that it learns from its mistakes.  After this  you can cut yourself loose and dictate straight into pages,  Safari,  iWeb and so on. But I find  that when I am dictating into these other programs,  I tend not to use  the built in correction – it’s faster just to go back and select a word and retype it in. When you are first training your computer it’s worth the effort to get it to retrain its mistakes.

TRAINING YOURSELF

Be aware that it does take a bit of training –  not of the computer but of yourself –  to get the full efficiency out of  Mac speech dictate.  You have to learn certain phrases like ‘scratch that’, ‘microphone off’, ‘cap’, ‘begin quote’, ‘end quote’, ‘full-stop’, ‘new-line’ and so on.   More importantly,  you have to train yourself to speak clearly.  Not slowly, but clearly.  Dictate  can process my speech no matter how quickly I speak,  problem is that when I speak fast I tend to speak less clearly. Quite often when the computer makes a mistake I playback what I spoke and the mistake was not the computer’s recognition but the fact that I did not speak clearly.  Training yourself to speak clearly is probably the most important element in achieving good speech recognition.

STARTING OVER AGAIN AFTER 6 MONTHS

I found  that my dictation style changed over time, so after using Mac speech dictate for a few months, I went back and created  a new user and retrained  it from scratch –  giving be even better accuracy.  I think the main reason for this is that using Mac speech dictate has trained me to speak more clearly and pronounce my letters more accurately. The  problem was that when I first trained Mac speech dictate my speaking was a bit sloppy and I slurred some of my words.  So going back and retraining Mac speech dictate resulted in improved accuracy because I now speak more clearly.

CONCLUSION

I use Mac speech dictate all the time.  I am using it to write this article straight into  my web browser.  I use it to write my e-mails straight into Apple mail.  I use it for all my wordprocessing in pages.  Probably the limit for me  is that if I was doing less than one sentence I would type it by hand,  otherwise I will throw on the headset and dictate.

The accuracy  is not 100%.  In this particular article I have had to  edit about one word per sentence.  The  way I do it is that I speak a sentence,  then read over what I have spoken to make sure it makes sense,  editing any mistakes as I go.

Overall MacSpeech Dictate a great piece of software that has revolutionised the way I use my computer. If  you find yourself doing a lot of typing I would certainly recommend it!

You can buy Macspeech Dictate direct from Macspeech.