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Conceptually, MacSpeech is on iListen takes a somewhat different approach to dictation than does its competitor, IBM ViaVoice. For one thing, iListen is a Mac-only application, while ViaVoice is a part of dictation software developed for the PC platform. For another, iListen has been developed from the get go to be able to transcribe dictation into virtually any application that can accept typed text, while with ViaVoice for Mac you originally could only dictate into the program's dedicated word processor, SpeakPad. Direct dictation into a few specified applications was added with the introduction of ViaVoice Enhanced Edition, and has been expanded to support most applications in ViaVoice for OS X, but for most commands and for voice correction, you still must use SpeakPad and then transfer your text to it's desired destination. On the other hand, ViaVoice has had voice correction and the ability to "learn" progressively as you use it, and to add words to its vocabulary from the beginning in 1999, while iListen 1.0.1 did not. You consequently had the choice of voice correction and "learnability" in ViaVoice, or the ability to dictate text anywhere in iListen, but not both. At least until iListen 1.1 debuted last fall, with voice correction and the ability to expand its vocabulary added to its roster of features, but I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. I've had both ViaVoice Millennium Edition 1.2 and iListen 1.0.1 installed on my WallStreet PowerBook since 2000, and I've used both extensively. It was great to be able to dictate into a Tex Edit Plus or ICQ with iListen, but it was also excruciatingly slow on the 233 MHz G3. ViaVoice was initially also very slow on the WallStreet, but it speeded up significantly when I installed a 10 gigabyte Toshiba hard drive and upgraded from 96 MB to 192 MB of RAM in October, 2000, while iListen didn't show much improvement. The faster transcription proved seductive, and I pretty much settled on ViaVoice ME as my main dictation application at that point However, I did have an iListen interlude last summer when I tried owning a G4 Cube for awhile. For some reason, ViaVoice Millennium Edition would not install on the Cube, while iListen worked fine. Very well, in fact, transcribing dictation in just a bit slower than real time. However, I didn't end up warming to the Cube, and I traded for a 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook last October. I had eagerly anticipated their release of iListen 1.1, which was to get the missing features and also offer a speed improvement, so with the faster Pismo, I've figured that performance would be pretty good. However, 1.1 proved to be a big disappointment, at least for me. It was dog-slow; even slower than iListen 1.0.1 had been on the WallStreet, and it had a severe conflict with one or another of the few third - party system extensions that I use, as well as having a bug that caused Tex Edit Plus, my mainstay text application, to crash violently every time I tried to save work after dictating into it. iListen 1.1 was literally unusable on my Pismo, and I had some similarly dismal reader feedback. Consequently, I was not surprised when MacSpeech quickly released iListen 1.2 just before MacWorld Expo, hopefully with the bugs ironed out. I decided to try iListen 1.2 on the WallStreet, partly because I'm still using it as my production Mac, and I also wanted to be able to gauge any increase in speed with a frame of reference from by familiarity with iListen 1.0.1 on that machine. I also thought I would try to save myself sums setup time by importing an existing voice profile that I had from iListen 1.0.1. That proved to be a mistake. iListen 1.2 choked on the voice profile import and crashed spectacularly, apparently damaging one of its system extensions in the crash, since the WallStreet began crashing on startup until I trashed the MacSpeech stuff from the system folder and reinstalled the program. OK, so much for shortcuts. I trashed all of the MacSpeech/iListen files that I could find on the hard drive, and started again from scratch. Happily, the iListen installer is pretty quick, and so it wasn't a big deal to do not complete reinstall of the program. This time, everything went smoothly, and the "Learn My Voice" setup assistant opened properly. iListen comes with 12 training stories, and I had read all about one or two of them in my previous iListen 1.0.1 voice profile. However, Chuck Rogers of MacSpeech tells me that reading four training stories should be sufficient. I read five for good measure. I noticed that the Learn My Voice process seemed more responsive and faster in iListen 1.2 under Mac OS 9.2.1 than it had in iListen 1.0.1 under OS 9.0. The processing of my voice training files into a voice profile was definitely a lot faster. Cool so far. But the program also starts up faster than its predecessor too, although it's still takes a long time -- definitely longer than ViaVoice, especially when you have a large voice profile recorded. I was pleased to note that iListen 1.2 transcribes dictation much faster that iListen 1.0.1 did. It's not as fast and responsive as ViaVoice for OS X on the Pismo, but hey, that machine has more than twice the clock speed, a 50 percent faster system bus, and 33 percent more RAM. Taking those distinctions into account, the speed of iListen 1.2 on the old WallStreet is quite good, about on par with ViaVoice Millennium Edition, and I expect it will really fly on a faster Mac like 1,0.1 did on the Cube. I noticed that iListen 1.2 was considerably faster when I had tested it with just three training stories read. Recognition accuracy is definitely better with the five stories read, but it appears that comparing dictated text to the larger voice profile slows things down a bit on this 233 MHz machine. It's a trade-off, but the higher degree of accuracy is probably worth taking a hit in speed. Speaking of accuracy, a new feature in iListen 1.1 and 1.2 is correction, which both cleans up misrecognized text, and also allows iListen to refine your voice profile, "learning" progressively as you use the program. To activate the iListen correction window, just say "correct this" or click on the correction by noon on the floater, and the window will open. You can then highlight the spelling errors and non sequiturs, and suggestions will appear in the right - hand field, allowing it to select the correct spelling or insert the desired correction and then select it. 
At least that's how it should work in theory. I found the correction mode horrifically buggy. I did get it to work at a few times, but even then it was cranky. When I went to correct the dictated draft for this article, the window would at first only partially display, and finally it crashed the program, bringing down the whole machine and necessitating a force restart. Fortunately I had saved the uncorrected draft. When I tried to use it again it simply refused to work at all. I think it still needs a lot of work. Unfortunately, there is no documentation in the online help file, at least that I could find, pertaining to the Correction window, so I was obliged to intuit how it should work, and I may have missed some nuances, but the behavior I experienced was not characteristic of user ignorance or error. A warning dialog kept appearing sporadically while I was dictating text (with the Correction window closed) telling me that Correction had detected a mouse click, and noting possible related unfortunate consequences. 
Unlike ViaVoice Millennium Edition, but like ViaVoice for OS X, iListen has a floating control palette, which is now about 20 percent larger than it used to be with the addition of a "Correction" button that wasn't there in the earlier versions. I considered the control palette in iListen 1.0.1 to big for my WallStreet's cramped 12.1 inch, 800 x 600 screen, and the new one is of course even worse, making me wish that there was a "minimize" option to scrunch it like there is in ViaVoice for Mac OS X. You can at least turne off the "I heard" pop-down feedback field, whose automatic expansions and contractions I find it extremely distracting. I wish one could also turn off the animated mascot. At least there are alternatives to the default image of Lykke, a dog belonging to one of the MacSpeech execs. I'm not partial to dogs, so I chose the alternative cartoon cat mascot, but I could do without any mascot at all, which would reduce the palette size. In terms of theoretical functionality, iListen is the current class of the field in legacy Mac OS dictation software. In terms of "refinement" (so to speak; I hesitate to call any of these programs "refined" - - both iListen and ViaVoice are pretty rough around the edges yet), ViaVoice has the edge, although it's still buggy as well, including the OS X edition. I would have to give ViaVoice the nod in dictation recognition accuracy too. It simply seems to understand my voice and inflexion better than iListen does. I've only ever had to read three training stories to ViaVoice (just two with ViaVoice X) to achieve a very acceptable level of accuracy. On the other hand, after five training stories, iListen still makes substantially more errors than ViaVoice does. Perhaps over time as I use the correction function (if I can get it to work - I very rarely bother with spelling correction in ViaVoice either because it's so clunky, but at least it doesn't crash) iListen's recognition capability will improve. Another area where ViaVoice Millennium Edition shines is in memory requirements. It works nicely with just the suggested 10,240k of memory allocated. iListen sucks up 61.9 MB of memory on my WallStreet, which makes things uncomfortably tight with my 192 megabytes of RAM (193 MB with Virtual Memory enabled at its minimum setting). Consequently, I was obliged to dial Virtual Memory up to 256 MB in order to keep from running out of memory with iListen running. That doesn't appear to be causing any problems. OS 9.2.1 seizes up about one time out of three while waking up from sleep, requiring a force restart with MacsBug, but it behaved like that before I installed iListen 1.2. The iListen Read Me does say that putting the Mac to sleep without first shutting down iListen can cause difficulties. Bummer. I put my PowerBook to sleep and reawaken it at least half a dozen times a day, and have continued to do so with iListen 1.2 installed, the and have noticed no apparent increase in the crash on start-up bug. However I really wouldn't want to have to boot up slow-starting iListen every time I woke the machine up. Whatever the difficulty here is, it needs fixing. Other areas that could use some work in iListen include: • The installation process. The installer itself works well enough, but that hassle I had trying to assimilate the old voice profile (which the Read Me says should have been supported) was not very satisfactory, and the resultant necessity of removing extension files and doing a "clean reinstall" would probably have confounded a less experienced user. • RAM demands. I'm not sure anything can be done about this, but iListen surely wants a lot of RAM, as I noted above. Don't even think about using it on a machine with less than 128 MB of real RAM installed, and I would say that 256 MB it is a more practical minimum comfort level if you plan to use more than a handful of other programs. • iListen's inability to support OS9.1, my favorite Mac OS version, is a pain. Bug in the 9.1 OS or not, this doesn't seem to be an obstacle for other applications. • The aforementioned bugs in the correction function. • That floating palette is way to big and unnecessarily so. A minimize function please. None of these are fatal flaws as far as the main task of dictation goes, and this application does a pretty good job at that. I hope that development will continue on the legacy iListen application now that MacSpeech is working on an OS X product. For now, if you have enough RAM, iListen 1.2 could be your ideal choice in legacy Mac OS dictation software. Its ability to dictate virtually anywhere is what makes it the most attractive alternative among the classic Mac OS dictation products. It is very convenient to be able to dictate text right into your favorite application, with full - featured functionality intact, and it is here that iListen puts distance between itself and the legacy versions of ViaVoice. However, as I said in my review of the ViaVoice for Mac OS X last week, that program takes dictation on the Mac into another dimension. I gave ViaVoice X an Applelinks Rating of four smileys (it has room for improvement too), so I will give iListen 1.2 three smileys. 
Bear in mind also that a 233 MHz WallStreet is not the ideal platform for iListen, although any G3 Mac is officially supported. I actually have iListen 1,0,1 installed on my 200 MHz 604e UMAX S-900 (unsupported) and it works, albiet with the speed of continental drift, but it's better than no dictation at all, and I did some useful, if leasurely, work with it last year when I used the UMAX for production for a week. I will install iListen 1.2 on the Pismo, and post a mini-review update on how it performs on the faster machine. System requirements:
iListen sells for $99 ($19.95 upgrade) without a microphone headset. You can download the iListen 1.2 upgrade here:
For more information, visit:
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