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I had considered waiting until I have a few weeks experience under my belt with ViaVoice for 0S X before writing a review, but there is so much interest in this product, and I'm so excited about it myself, that I decided to do an overview and first impressions piece on it right away. When I begin using ViaVoice X for production work, after I switch to OS X, I will post a follow-up report. I've been using the original ViaVoice for the Mac, Millennium Edition, for nearly two years now, and have also used the competing MacSpeech iListen dictation product quite extensively. These programs have literally made it possible for me to continue working as a professional writer, since a lot of the time, when my chronic polyneuritis is flaring up, typing more than a paragraph or two puts me in real pain and/or causes my hands and arms to go numb. I don't think I have manually typed an entire full-length article or column since the early summer of 2000. Dictation software is serious business for me. Which is why I'm so delighted with ViaVoice for OS X. The earlier Mac versions of ViaVoice are a whole lot better than no dictation software at all, and iListen shows promise as well, but they were both very rough around the edges, while my brief encounter with ViaVoice X so far has been a step into a new dimension. I now understand firsthand why this program won Best of Show in July 2001 at MacWorld Expo NY. Millennium Edition runs pretty slowly on my 233 MHz WallStreet PowerBook (which is the minimum configuration officially supported), and somewhat faster on my 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook. iListen 1.0.1 is excruciatingly slow on the WallStreet and reasonably speedy on the Pismo (iListen would also transcribe dictation in a bit slower than real time on my erstwhile G4 Cube). However, ViaVoice X running on the Pismo puts them all on the trailer, both in terms of speed (near real time) and accuracy of recognition. It is, as I said, a whole new dimension. I had wondered whether the OS X version of ViaVoice would require scaling a steep learning curve. However, I needn't have worried. The program is quite similar to its legacy Mac OS progenitors, and anyone who has used ViaVoice Millennium Edition or Enhanced Edition will feel quite at home, albeit with a new Aqua interior decoration scheme, and some substantially updated appliances.
New features in ViaVoice for Mac OS X compared with ViaVoice Enhanced Edition include:
I did experience an initial hiccup in trying to install ViaVoice X. I put the ViaVoice CD in the Pismo's DVD drive, and double clicked the icon. In the CD window I double clicked ViaVoice installer, but when the installer window opened, it was labeled "ASM" and the only thing showing there was the installer for the third party ASM (application switcher menu) third-party utility, which I had installed some time ago. This was definitely weird. Must be some sort of conflict between the ViaVoice installer and the ASM hack. OK, I decided, I'll just uninstall ASM and trash everything that has to do with the program. I like ASM, but it's not essential, and I could easily get it back again when I wanted to. I did a Sherlock search to make what I thought was sure that all the ASM stuff was gone. It was, at least as far as Sherlock was concerned. I also did a visual check of my "Installers" folder, into which I dump all OS X software installer stuffed files for backup. No sign of ASM there either. I emptied the Trash and restarted the Pismo.. However, when I tried to run the ViaVoice installer again, nothing had changed. All that appeared in the installer window, which was still labeled "ASM," was the application switcher menu installer. I was stumped, so I dashed off an email to ViaVoice tech support. Within 12 hours, received a reply from Jeff Bannerman of IBM Speech Products Tech Support suggesting that the workaround for the problem I was having would be to create a new user profile in OS X and install the program under it. Worked like a charm, and ViaVoice installed under my new login identity with no difficulty, the whole process taking about 10 minutes. Once ViaVoice X was installed, I logged out, and then logged back in under my main user identity, and all was well. Now, The painful part of getting up and running with any dictation software is voice training. You have to familiarize the program's speech engine with the idiosyncrasies of your voice patterns and accent, by reading it long passages of text, which the program then processes into a personal voice profile. This must be done for each individual user. The training material is in the form of stories that you read aloud as they appear in a prompt field on the screen. The IBM folks say they have reduced training session requirements to get you up and running more quickly than in any previous versions of ViaVoice for Macintosh, however I didn't notice any radical difference from two years ago when I first set up ViaVoice. I was mildly disappointed to discover that ViaVoice X has the same six, or actually three -- parts 1 and 2 respectively -- training stories as did Millennium Edition. These can be mildly entertaining the first time around, but when you have installed ViaVoice as many times as I have, they get a bit old. Anyway, at least the ViaVoice X Setup Assistant will be familiar to users who have previously installed Millennium Edition or ViaVoice Enhanced Edition for the legacy Mac OS. The assistant graphically walks you through hooking up, testing, and adjusting your microphone (ViaVoice X ships with an Andrea USB microphone headset that comes with assorted color accent clip-ons, which are a bit Žpass, but still perhaps of interest to candy color iMac and iBook owners. More about the Andrea mic below); then takes you through the voice training protocol. I've never had to read more than three to ViaVoice Millennium Edition to get acceptable transcription accuracy, so I decided that I would see how reading just the excerpt from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, parts 1 and 2, would work for starters with ViaVoice X. I once again waded my way through Jim Hawkins' adventures with Billy Bones, and let the Pismo process my voice model, which took about five minutes. I skipped the Setup Assistant's "Analyze My Documents" function for the present, quit the Assistant, and started up ViaVoice SpeakPad -- the program's dedicated word processor, picked up the nearest book and began reading a paragraph at random..... Wow! ViaVoice may be optimized for the G4 chip's Altivec engine, but it copies dictation on my 500 MHz G3 Pismo PowerBook with a modest 256 MB of RAM at essentially the speed I dictate. But even cooler, I was making no special effort to enunciate distinctly -- just rattling off text from the book in order to see that the program was working, but ViaVoice transcribed my words with about 99% accuracy, and remember, I only read two of the six training stories and didn't bother to analyze my documents. Very impressive. Aside from the general, Aqua motif, the most visible change is the new VoiceCenter floating control palette module that provides a central interface for controlling the main ViaVoice settings and preferences. 
The VoiceCenter can be displayed in three different views; the default mode being a trapezoidal, lozenge shape that includes a microphone on/off toggle button, a three-way toggle for ViaVoice X's trio of speech modes: Dictation only; command only; and a combined Dictation and Command mode. Between these two buttons is a color-blindness-friendly audio input level indicator, which shows lime green when the level is correct, and fuchsia if you are speaking too loudly. Finally, there are the familiar OS X traffic light buttons, which toggle between the Zoomed Out (default), Zoomed In (a scrunched version of the VoiceCenter), and Minimized to the Dock. 
The last voice command ViaVoice has recognized is also displayed in a one line text field above the VoiceCenter. The VoiceCenter also has a pull-down door that contains nine more control buttons for:
• What Can I Say - displays a list of available voice commands.
The only complaint I have about the VoiceCenter, which I think is quite charming, is that the drawer button icons are a bit cryptic in terms of visually conveying their function. ViaVoice Enhanced Edition had a limited ability to dictate directly into a few specified applications -- what IBM calls Dictation Stream Redirection -- although performance wasn't up to much compared with dictating directly into the program's dedicated SpeakPad word processor. With ViaVoice for Mac OS X, you can dictate into most Classic and native Mac OS X applications that will accept typed text. For example, I am dictating these words right now into Tex Edit Plus, my favorite word-crunching application. This is much more convenient, at least in some instances, than dictating into SpeakPad and then transferring the text with the clipboard, which has been my modus operandi with ViaVoice Millennium Edition. However, voice correction and some voice commands do not work when dictating directly into other applications, and I expect that in many cases I will continue to use SpeakPad for that reason. 
Incidentally, IBM is to be commended for providing a very decent printed manual with ViaVoice X -- much improved from the one that came with ViaVoice Millennium Edition (although one is thankful for any sort of print manual with software these days). Once you have completed a dictation and editing session with SpeakPad, a simple voice command -- " transfer to <name of application>" -- will transfer text if the application name is one that is supported by ViaVoice. I tried this with Eudora when I emailed the draft for this article from the Pismo to the WallStreet using Eudora. Very Slick!
Supported applications include:
Another new feature in ViaVoice for Mac OS X is that it allows you to navigate the Internet using voice commands -- at least if you have Microsoft Internet Explorer on your computer. Now, as regular readers know, I have been boycotting Microsoft software for the past 16 months or so, but Microsoft Internet Explorer actually is on my Pismo PowerBook, since it installed with the system, so purely in the interests of research, I was able to try out this feature. It is quite an uncanny. Just say "Surf The Web" and ViaVoice opens Internet Explorer. Once IE is up and running, you say "What Can I Say," which allows you to view the voice commands available under the category of Internet Explorer Favorites. Say "jump to " followed by the name of your favorite URL, and ViaVoice pastes in the URL and sends IE to that page. This is all very cool, but not enough to convince me to use Internet Explorer. I wonder how hard it would be for IBM to add support for other browsers? ViaVoice for Mac OS X also allows you to control most features by voice, affording an almost hands-free experience on the Mac, and allows you to navigate the Finder and to control applications by voice. By default, you can issue commands like "copy this," "paste this," etc., for any application that supports the corresponding keyboard shortcut. These commands reference a Keyboard Shortcut Dictionary (KSD) file that provides information on the commands available, and the corresponding keyboard shortcuts. You can create your own KSD files to add commands to your favorite applications, using ViaVoice X's KSD editor. ViaVoice for Mac OS X provides voice commands for pressing keys and clicking the mouse for people with carpal tunnel syndrome. In fact, ViaVoice X has more than 500 commands of allow you to navigate your system by voice. Additionally, you can send voice commands to your favorite applications. ViaVoice will open almost all applications located in the Mac OS X Applications folder simply by saying "open" followed by the name of the application. I usually correct misrecognized dictated text using the mouse and keyboard, but if you wish, ViaVoice for Mac OS X can perform most types of text correction using voice only (so long as you are in the SpeakPad window. Loy's correction does not work when you're dictating directly into other applications. In SpeakPad, you can change formatting with simple commands that are found in the "What Can I Say" window, and also correct dictated words or phrases through the voice-activated correction. While correcting dictation, you can add words to your personal vocabulary, as well as create macro shortcuts for commonly used phrases and special terminology. For example, you can create a macro which will type the URL for your Internet homepage whenever you dictate "my website." The more you use ViaVoice, the more it learns about your vocabulary and speech patterns, which tended to be to better recognition. One big change is that ViaVoice now has a 160,000 word vocabulary -- more than twice the size of the vocabularies in previous ViaVoice versions. There is also a 290,000 word capacity backup dictionary for adding new words. You can review your personal vocabulary to delete unneeded workers or change pronunciations as you will. ViaVoice offers topics and add-on vocabularies that can expand the program's already impressive base vocabulary. ViaVoice comes bundled with four specialized topics: Computers; Business and Finance; Chatter's Jargon; and Cuisine. Topics are automatically available when you install ViaVoice (without any in the additional installation steps), and you can just turn them on an off as desired. You should turn on a particular topic when dictating reports or correspondence in one of these specialized categories. For example, when dictating tax on the topic of computer technology, turn on the Computer topic to expand the focus of your computer tech terminology vocabulary. Also available for the first time in ViaVoice for the Mac, are optional legal and medical special vocabularies which sell for $149 each. 
The new ViaVoice X preferences window provides a single, centralized location where you can customize all of the features in ViaVoice for Mac OS X. You can also now change almost every preference by voice if you wish. Information Central is a single location containing all the help information available online in ViaVoice X. To access information central, just click on Information Central in the VoiceCenter drawer. I haven't found a whole lot to complain about yet in ViaVoice X, at least compared with previous dictation software efforts for the Mac. We've come a long way from the first discreet dictation applications I used, such as Dragon PowerSecretary and Voice Power Pro, in terms of functionality, speed, accuracy, and polish. However, dictation technology still has a long way to go, and ViaVoice X is far from what I would consider the ideal in this category of software. It's still cumbersome to set up (those training stories) and there is room for improvement in recognition accuracy. Then there's the microphone issue. One reader wrote claiming that the only microphone supported by ViaVoice for OS X is the bundled Andrea USB set, which is serviceable, but no great shakes as microphones go. However I tried running ViaVoice X using a cheapo no-name PC-style (non PlainTalk) analog mic plugged into a Griffin iMic USB adapter, and lo and behold, it works! ViaVoice Setup Assistant even declares its sound input "Very Good." However, the sound playback isn't supported (the Andrea has a separate cable that runs between the Mac's sound-out port and the mic cables USB converter box for sound playback through the earphones). However, this means that at least some other mics will work for dictation. I also tried an Apple PlainTalk mic, which works fine with ViaVoice Millennium Edition, but it doesn't work with ViaVoice X, a disappointment, because I still prefer analog sound in, but this is really an OS X issue I think. Addendum: I am now informed that it is not an OS X issue, and that analog input works very well with OS X. The problem appears to be an arbitrary decision by IBM to only support USB mics. If so, that is, IMHO, an abysmally stupid call, and whoever is responsible should be tarred and feathered (slight exaggeration there ;-b ). He/she can join whatever bright light decided to eliminate analog sound-in ports from recent Macs in the stupid decision hall of shame. One of the reasons I decided to buy a Pismo was tha it is the last PowerBook with an analog sound in port. Dumb, Dumb. Dumb. Addendum II:
From Anonymous by request Hi Charles,
Nice review of VV. I have a couple of answers for you about VV.
1) Only USB Mics are supported because the Apple audio core does not
support analog properly on all machines. It was not an IBM decision,
nothing was done to disable analog input. In fact ths may work in
future OS X releases.
But there is an upside, because of the audio problems VV was released
with 10.1 instead fo 10.0 and this allowed many more features to be
included and some of these features are ones that you were very positive
about in your review.
2) The same training stories are used because substantial work went into
them years ago to insure that they covered speech well. It was
considered a liability to change these from a quality of recognition
view point.
Please don't use my name, I'm not sure how confidential this information
is but it could possibly hinder my future employment.
Anonymous Thanks A. So it turns out that it is an Apple problem. More of the Apple USB audio whether you like it or not tomfoolery, I guess.
I'm giving ViaVoice X a four smiley Applelinks rating.
 ViaVoice sells for $179.95
For more information, visit:
ViaVoice for Macintosh Enhanced Edition Free Update To ViaVoice X Some ViaVoice Enhanced Edition packages shipped with a sticker offering a free OS X upgrade. In order to exercise the offer, visit this http://www-4.ibm.com/software/speech/macrebate/eeosx-rebate.html Web Page where you can either download the OS X edition (200 MB!) or order a CD for $5.95. There are three ways Mac Enhanced Edition owners can upgrade to ViaVoice Mac OS X Edition: 1. FREE Internet download of ViaVoice for Mac OS X Edition (200 MB)
This upgrade option includes:
2. ViaVoice for Mac OS X Edition, CD-ROM software only -- $5.95 (shipping and handling charge) This upgrade option includes:
There are two ways you can place your order for the $5.95 option for upgrading to ViaVoice for Mac OS X Edition: a. Download a printable upgrade form from the upgrade Website and fax the completed form to 1-561-862-2225 b. Call 1-800-Talk2Me to order your $.5.95 upgrade option order over the phone
3. ViaVoice for Mac OS X Edition, with hard copy publications -- $19.95 This upgrade option includes:
I recommend the latter. The ViaVoice X manual is guite good, actually, and IBM is to be commended for supplying a decent print manual with this application, a regrettably unusual feature these days even with expensive software (I fondly recall my 1993 copy of MS Word 5.1 coming with six printed manuals totalling some 1200 pages!)
CDs are sent regular U.S. Mail. Allow 7-10 business days for delivery.
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