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A question I've been frequently asked during nor the decade of using and writing about MacSpeech dictation software products is whether they would work for transcribing recorded voice on your files. Until recently, the answers have been qualified "sort of" end quote with particular hardware devices (notably Olympus Digital voice recorders). It was possible with MacSpeech iListen, for instance, but not exactly elegant or simple.
That's now changed with the introduction of MacSpeech Scribe, the developers first really purpose-designed transcription solution for users who need to work with recorded digital audio files. Scribe has the capability to transcribe speaker-entered recordings with a simple button-click, either from a recording of the user's own voice, or that of someone other if you have a voice training profile for them available, since like MacSpeech Dictate, MacSpeech Scribe is a speaker-dependent speech recognition system.
However, unlike previous MacSpeech Dictate and products, including Dictate, Scribe is designed specifically to support transcription of recorded voice files, supporting input from a variety of audio file formats, including: .wav, .aif, .aiff, .m4v, .mp4, and .m4a
You can record dictation and transcribe your voice recordings via the intermediary of an Apple iPhone or iPod touch (second generation or later), the Olympus Digital voice recorder range such as the Olympus DM-420, DS-3400, and DS-5000, or even audio files recorded using your computer and a microphone (preferably one certified and suggested by MacSpeech, of which there is a wide selection you can find listed at:
http://www.macspeech.com/pages.php?pID=67
It should be noted, however, that Scribe is not designed to distinguish input containing multiple users on the same audio file, such as might be created during an interview between two or more individuals. I don't doubt that such technology will someday be available, but we're not there yet, at least for desktop computers at affordable prices. Audio sources containing multiple voices cannot currently be processed through a single voice profile was sufficiently accurate results.
What Scribe is designed to do is to take a quality audio recording on an individual person's voice and transcribe it to editable computer text - like MacSpeech Dictate does, only with the convenient capability of time-shifting and in the case of an iPhone or iPod touch, portability. You don't have to be in front of a computer when you create your file: as long as it's a high-quality audio recording of your own voice in one of the supported file formats. Just open the audio file with MacSpeech Scribe, click the Transcribe button, and the program does the donkey work, entering the recorded content into Scribe's text Notepad.
However, one important distinction between Dictate and Scribe is that the latter does not support dictation into third-party applications. Text must be entered into Scribe's Notepad and then copied and pasted into its destination document or saved as a text file. Another difference is that Scribe lets you create up to six different speech profiles, in order to ensure maximum transcription accuracy for up to six distinct recording devices.
While Scribe, like Dictate, uses the Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech engine developed originally for Windows PCs by MacSpeech's new corporate parent, Nuance Communications, it is not a port of a Windows application and has been engineered from the get-go as a Macintosh OS X application by MacSpeech. The program recognizes 13 distinct English dialect versions, and supports training for individual words and/or adding new ones not in its dictionary.
Installation is fairly straightforward. If you don't already have MacSpeech Dictate installed, first open OS X. System Preferences and in the Universal Access panel, make sure the box for "Enable access for assistive devices" is checked. Now insert the MacSpeech Scribe application disk in your optical drive and drag the program's icon to your Applications Folder. Double click the icon to launch Scribe. When prompted, (you may not be if you've already got Dictate installed) insert the MacSpeech Scribe Data Disk and load the support files required for the program onto your hard drive.
You will then be prompted to register the software, which requires an Internet connection, although you can postpone that step for up to four days. Your registration code is found on the second page MacSpeech Scribe QuickStart Guide. Store that in a safe place.
Scribe will also need to be calibrated and trained to recognize your voice accurately. The first step is to create an audio file "significantly longer than two minutes" (why not just say 8 to 10 minutes, which is what's recommended?). The content can anything you like. A short newspaper or magazine article should be fine. This step can be done with one of the aforementioned Olympus Digital voice recorders, an iPhone, iPod touch, or directly with a external microphone (the computer's built -- in microphone is not adequate for dictation).
If you chose the latter method, make sure the USB microphone noise canceling microphone is the selected input device in the System Preferences Sound panel, then open the QuickTime Player app. in your Applications Folder, and choose the New Audio Recording command from the File Menu. When you finish recording, click the Stop button, and save the audio file to your hard drive.
Once the Scribe is installed and registered, you need to calibrate the analysis engine for your language (currently English only) and your accent, and one area where MacSpeech Scribe still needs a bit of work is in simplifying and streamlining the calibration and training process. Even as a decade plus veteran of using MacSpeech dictation applications, I found figuring out how to proceed how shall we say? "Less than intuitive." All I can say is review the instructions carefully before starting and keep them at hand for reference as you progress. Fortunately, Scribe includes a complete online, searchable Help book.
Here are the broad strokes. With Scribe launched, create a new voice profile by clicking the plus sign at the bottom left-hand corner of the window. When prompted, type a descriptive name, choose the correct variant of English from the spelling and accent drop-down menus, and click the Create button. A navigation dialog box will appear, in which you find and highlight the audio file created in the step above; click the Open button.
You will only use two minutes of the audio file to calibrate your profile. Use the trimming markers to click the audio file at the beginning or end if necessary.
Click the Transcribe button, the audio file will be processed, and the results displayed in the training window. Click on text to highlight and display any errors in the correction window, making corrections as appropriate. Once the text correctly matches the audio, click accept.
During training, you'll notice punctuation marks are displayed as words. Don't attempt to correct these words; it's not required.
After a few abortive attempts I did figure things out and succeeded in creating a voice profile, and back in the positive column I was delighted to note that Scribe matches Dictate in its uncanny ability to accurately transcribe dictation after even relatively minimal initial training.
To check out the transcribing function, press the Transcribe button and choose is the entire previously recorded audio file without trimming to two minutes. Use the entire 8 to 10 minutes. It's pretty cool watching the sentences appear in the Notepad window as the program "reads" your dictated audio and converts it to text. I didn't find Scribe impressively fast on my 2 GB 2 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 4 MB of RAM, and I expect it would be pretty lazy on a lesser powered machine, but it's still a lot faster than manually typing. Once the transcription is completed, you can go through the text, clicking on passages (amazingly few) where there are mistakes, and Scribe will display possible alternative spellings and phrasings in the right-hand sidebar. If one matches, click on its number and it will replace the non-sequitur or error in the main text. You can also edit manually in both the text pane or the correction pane.
When transcription, corrections, and edits are complete, save the file or simply copy and paste the results into another application. Overall, Scribe is a pretty slick piece of work that will be a definite boon to anyone who wants or needs to record thoughts at the spur of the moment or do dictation work while untethered from a computer.
I did encounter one particularly annoying bug with Scribe. I'm a sloppy typist. I manage a bit over 50 words a minute with reasonable accuracy, but I'm not a touch typist by any means and there is little science in my method, so inadvertently hitting unintended keys is not unusual for me, and I found that pressing something (not sure what) on the far right of my keyboard accidentally during correction would cause Scribe to crash, and lose the work underway. Very inconvenient, especially when I managed to do it twice in a row. I admire my wife for her perseverance in teaching herself to touch type using the little Typing Tutor app., but have never been able to spare the time or muster the patience myself. However, 50 WPM is usually about as fast as I can compose anyway, and with dictation software I find I manage pretty well.
MacSpeech Scribe requires an Intel-based Macintosh and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
The MacSpeech Scribe 1.0.1 update, released at the end of March, fixes reported issues. Customers of the MacSpeech Scribe family of products, including MacSpeech Scribe Medical and MacSpeech Scribe Legal, can update to the corresponding version 1.0.1 from directly within the application. Detailed information on MacSpeech Scribe 1.0.1 can be found at:
http://www.macspeech.com/releasenotes/
MacSpeech Scribe is available in English only, for US$149 directly from the MacSpeech web site at http://www.macspeech.com/ in the US; at http://www.macspeech.co.uk in the UK; at http://www.macspeech.ca/ in Canada; and at http://www.macspeech.com.au in Australia.
For more information, visit:
http://www.macspeech.com/
Charles W. Moore
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