As a writer, speech recognition software has always fascinated me. It sounds like the Holy Grail of computing: you speak and it types. Unfortunately, the reality has always fallen far short of expectations.

A few years ago I tried MacSpeech's iListen software, but was left extremely unimpressed. I felt a bit deceived -- it was promoted as not needing much training, but even after hours of training it still made far too many errors to be useful. Worse, it required a special microphone which was a hassle to connect and use.

At MacWorld this year MacSpeech announced a new product called Dictate which promises to bring Dragon's Naturally Speaking from the PC to the Macintosh. Supposedly this is a much better speech recognition engine and I would have better results. I was eager to try it so I purchase the upgrade.

The results are impressive. Dictate is definitely much better than iListen. With very little training -- less than five minutes -- and using the built-in microphone of my MacBook laptop, I am able to achieve decent results.

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