Cool Mac Gear• iPod Video • iPod nano • iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Garageband |
MacSpeech, Inc. has announced that its long-awaited version 1.1 update to its iListen dictation software is now available for purchase from resellers and on the company's web site. "We are pleased to finally be able to offer this update," said MacSpeech Chief Evangelist Chuck Rogers. "We will continue to offer improvements to iListen and we are also hard at work on our first dictation product for Mac OS X." iListen offers dictation, editing, formatting and simple speech navigation with any application, and frees you from the keyboard and mouse. You are able to dictate text, edit and format it with just the power of your voice. If you find you are repeating yourself a lot, create a text macro with those words. Then you can "type" those words with a single phrase or single word. iListen also supports MacSpeech Ready application enhancements. Other application vendors have used our programmers interface to make their applications "MacSpeech Ready". This leads to faster, more accurate dictation and additional application specific commands. iListen also provides simple speech navigation. You can operate menus, press buttons and control the mouse by voice. New in this version:
System requirements:
I have been using iListen since the late betas of 2000, and I found that version 1.0.1 ran very nicely and quickly (near real time dictation) on my former G4 Cube, although it was pretty poky on my 233 MHz WallStreet PowerBook. Consequently, I had high hopes for version 1.1 on my new-to-me Pismo PowerBook that I switched to three weeks ago. I downloaded a pre-release copy of iListen 1.1 shortly after getting the Pismo, and my intention was to have a full review ready for Moore's Views & Reviews as soon as the public release was announced. Unfortunately, apart from the installation, which went smoothly enough, I haven't been having very good luck with iListen 1,1 on this Pismo (500 MHz with 256 MB of RAM). I used my voice profile from iListen 1.0.1, but read the update a couple of the stories that had not been trained in order to "refresh" it a bit. Since iListen does not support OS 9.1, I switched to my alternate installation of OS 9.2.1 for the test, but I was disheartened to discover that the upgraded program transcribed text at a snail's pace -- even slower than iListen 1.0.1 on my 233 MHz WallStreet, while I had I expected that the 50 MHz faster Pismo would be at least as fast as the 450 MHz Cube had been with this non-Altivec optimized software, it was dramatically slower. Excruciating. ViaVoice Millennium Edition is quite brisk at taking dictation on the Pismo, so I know that the potential is there. Also, the program hard-crashed at the end of my dictation session each time I tried to save the work (in Tex-Edit Plus), requiring a "three finger salute" force restart. I wrote to MacSpeech's Chuck Rogers to see if he could shed any light on my problems. Chuck got back to me directly, noting that this is not typical behavior with iListen 1.1 (I hadn't thought that it was). He noted that there is a ground loop issue with some PowerBooks, and it might be that 1.1 is more sensitive to this due to the new features - especially because of the added processor cycles to do things like correction, and also provided several suggestions for workarounds to try:
€ Try making a "MacSpeech ALL" extension set by duplicating the Mac OS 9.2 ALL extension set and adding the three MacSpeech extensions. Restart with this set and see if things improve. If they do, you probably have an extension conflict of some kind. Bingo! on this one as far as the slow transcription issue was concerned. With just the Mac OS extensions plus the three MacSpeech extensions loaded, iListen 1.1 came to life, and copied my dictation roughly as fast as the G4 Cube had with iListen 1.0.1. Presumably an extension conflict of some sort. Thing is, I run a pretty lean System heap normally, and the few third party extensions that I do load are for things I can't get along without.
€ Try throwing away the MacSpeech folder inside your Preferences folder. It is possible that some older preferences might be causing problems. Not applicable, as I was working with a fresh install of OS 9.2.1, and the MacSpeech preferences were new.
€ In Word, make sure you shut off interactive Spell and Grammar checking. iListen will never misspell a word, and you can check grammar manually later on. Not a problem for me. I don't use Word.
€ You can also turn off iListen's "Display I Heard" preference to free up some computer cycles. I had already done that. So, the speed problem was identified as an extension conflict, but I still found that every time I tried to save a document in Tex Edit Plus with dictated text, I would invariably get a hard crash. The MacsBug screen didn't even come up. Gray screen. Three finger salute necessary. This is, I emphasize, with just the Mac OS extensions plus the MacSpeech extensions turned on in Extensions Manager and only iListen and Tex Edit Plus running, and it happened every time I tried to save. This did not happen with iListen 1.0.1 on the other machines. My Pismo is normally very stable. In fact, in the 3 weeks I've been using it as my workhorse, iListen 1.1 is the only application that's ever crashed it, and I usually have about 20 applications open all the time, and go a week or so between restarts. Consequently, no full review of iListen 1.1 possible yet, and I'm stymied as to what to try next. There's not much point in chasing down the extension conflict unless the crash issue is dealt with first. Now, I hasten to emphasize that this problem is not typical of the performance that the vast majority of beta testers experienced with iListen 1.1, or MacSpeech would never have released the product. It may be a Pismo incompatibility of sorts, and I will continue to experiment as time permits. I would very much like to hear from anyone else who has experienced similar problems with iListen 1,1. In the meantime, here's a testimonial from a happy iListen 1.1 user that Chuck Rogers forwarded to me:
"I've been using iListen 1.1 ever since you released it to registered users and really find it amazing. It's definitely a major improvement over version 1.0.1 or any other Mac dictation software. My only problem lies with using the new correction mode that I'm sure that practice will correct those problems, although I may have to read the manual.
"When you make your general announcement of this update I will definitely post a rave review on the MacVoice bulletin board.
"Congratulations to the entire team. This update was definitely worth waiting for. With the right advertising, this should be a very successful product."
I'm hoping that is more characteristic performance users are getting with iListen 1.1. Let me know. You can read my full review of iListen 1.1 here:
iListen is $99 demoware For more information, visit:
Page: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
|
Cool Mac Gear• iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Keyboard Skins • Garageband
| ||||||
|
| ||||||||
