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The Road Warrior Mailbag - November 17, 2008

Voice Recognition on the Mac

From Ken Shifrin

Hello Charles

I hope you don't mind me writing to you to ask for your advice. I got your address from Richard Houston in response to a posting I made on the OxMacUser group. He thought you had experience in this area.

Briefly, we're about to buy an Intel iMac and some speech-to-text software. We've been advised that the best thing is Dragon Naturally Speaking v10 which we'd have to run on Windows via Parallels Desktop. We loathe using Windows, and I've seen a program called MacSpeech Dictate which seems to get very good reviews, especially in its latest iteration (v.1.2). I wondered what your experience of these is and which of these paths you thought we might best pursue. Or maybe there's another alternative altogether that we've overlooked?

Any help or advice you can give would be greatly appreciated. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes
Ken Shifrin

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Hi Ken;

I do have about ten years experience using Macs with dictation software. I'm still running a Power PC Mac, so haven't been able to upgrade from MacSpeech's iListen 1.8 to their new Dictate program, but I can convey based on the experience of colleagues who've tested Dictate that it's an excellent dictation program, which is no surprise since it uses the same speech engine as Dragon Naturally Speaking which you've been correctly advised is the gold standard of speech recognition software.

My inclination for use with a Mac would be to go with native Dictate rather than running DNS in Parallels. If you do decide to pursue the latter solution, I suggest contacting DNS Support before purchasing the software to confirm that the program will be a happy camper running in Parallels Desktop. I'm not sure if there would be any problematical issues there or not.

I hope this helps a bit.

Charles


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