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I’ve been cheering for the MacSpeech dictation software team since back in 1998, after Articulate Systems. pulled the plug on PowerSecretary, the erstwhile discrete speech dictation application for the Mac, and for a while there was almost no speech transcription software available for the Mac platform at all. I say “almost,” because Articulate Systems. sold PowerSecretary to a British firm which upgraded it slightly for later OS version compatibility and marketed it as Voice Power Pro, but not very aggressively in North America.

MacSpeech was founded by Andrew Taylor and some fellow Dragon Systems alumni who had worked on PowerSecretary, for the purpose of designing and developing a new, Mac-only continuous speech dictation application. However, IBM beat them to market with ViaVoice Millennium Edition for the Mac in the fall of 1999. After forming an alliance with the speech software division of Dutch electronics giant Phillips, MacSpeech released their iListen product in the fall of 2000.

iListen 1.0 boasted a significant advantage over ViaVoice -- the ability to transcribe spoken dictation into virtually any text field where one could enter text by typing, and to accept speech Finder commands. On the other hand, the original release of the product had no voice correction or vocabulary learning capability, and I found it both slower and less accurate on my WallStreet 233 PowerBook than ViaVoice ME. On the other hand, iListen 1.0.1 worked quite well on my G4 Cube, transcribing dictation at a satisfactory pace. iListen 1.0.1 also had the advantage of being able to run (very slowly) even on my 200 MHz UMAX S-900 604e, on which ViaVoice refused to install at all.

iListen 1.1 followed in the fall of 2001, adding voice correction and vocabulary learning fact features. Unfortunately, I found the 1.1 release completely unusable -- slow, buggy, conflict-plagued, and crash-prone, even on my 500 MHz Pismo. MacSpeech hustled to get a bug fix out the door, and version 1.2, released in January, 2002, was reasonably stable and much faster than the 1.x versions had been. However, the voice correction and vocabulary update features were, to put it bluntly, horrible, and I had little success trying to make them work.

Consequently, I had high hopes that iListen 1.2.1, which was released in late April, would squash these bugs as well and let this application, which has so much promise, realize its potential. I downloaded the iListen 1.2 .1 upgrader the day it was released, and have been using it for dictation chores for a couple of weeks now. First the good news. iListen 1.2.1 is the fastest, most stable version of iListen yet. Transcription speed, and even on my old WallStreet 233, is not bad, and I suspect that it would be completely satisfactory on any Mac of 400 MHz are better. Accuracy is quite good as well, although not up to the current high water mark standard set by ViaVoice for OS X.

The ability to dictate text virtually anywhere is extremely cool, and convenient. ViaVoice for OS X, which I have been using on my 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook, will now dictate into most application and text fields as well, but without correction support in that mode.

Installing the update went smoothly, onto the iListen 1.2 installation already on my hard drive. I started up iListen 1.2 and decided that it would be a good idea to read another of the training stories into my voice profile. However, about 10 pages into the story, the Setup Assistant crashed, requiring a restart of the Mac. Not an auspicious beginning. I decided to forget about more training for now, and restarted the program. Dictation, happily, worked fine, and indeed seemed quicker than with Version 1.2. Recognition accuracy seemed better as well.

Unfortunately, iListen’s voice correction feature is still horrible, and in some respects worse than unusable -- at least I haven’t been able to get it to work very well at all. On my attempts to use it, it has often frozen, requiring a hard restart of the Mac. This behavior has been consistent both with under OS 9.2.1 on the Pismo, and with iListen Version 1.2.x under OS 9.2.2 on The WallStreet.

Not only that, but mouse cursor movement in the document you’re working with causes the iListen floating control palette, which is already annoyingly large even its most minimized configuration, to swell up into a big dialog box informing you that the program has detected a cursor movement (duh!), and that correction probably won’t work. It’s right about that. Not that it usually does anyway.

There’s no way to manually shrink the dialog box back to normal (it resets by itself after about 10-15 seconds), and since it is triggered by such things as the save command, and at least on my PowerBook screen is large enough to obscure the save dialog control button, it is exasperatingly annoying. It can be windowshaded, but that’s bothersome extra step. I wish there were a way to disable the correction feature, since I’ve found it useless, but there isn’t.

The iListen manual says:
“In order for iListen to adapt your voice model using correction, it must know exactly where it is in your document. However, iListen doesn’t know how to read the text of your document; it only keeps a record of the text you dictated. If you type into your document, or click the mouse, iListen knows you may have changed the document and the correction process may no longer be synchronized. Other actions that can cause iListen to become unsynchronized with your document include executing an iListen text macro or executing a command. In short, most user actions other than dictation may result in correction unsynchronization. When this happens, iListen displays a warning dialog box. As stated in the warning, iListen no longer knows exactly where the insertion point is in your document. Therefore, any changes you make using the Correction window could potentially end up entering text in the wrong place in your document. In order to resynchronize the Correction process, you may speak the command “Commit Corrections” or save your document, close it, and then reopen it.”

This is just too clunky for my taste.

Voice correction is still an unrealized objective in either iListen or ViaVoice. The latter’s implementation is clunky but usable if you’re patient and determined. iListen’s, at least in my experience, just plain unusable. The finickyness about cursor movements is completely unacceptable, and makes the whole exercise of a waste of time and effort. The program would be better without correction at all than with this.

And please, let’s have some way to turn off the little animated mascot in the iListen palette, which would retrieve a bit of screen real-estate and get rid of some totally useless processor overhead. I don’t need that cat (my choice from several graphical options) shaking its head at me all the time.

iListen 1.2.1 supports only Mac OS 9.0, 9.0.4, 9.2.1, and 9.2.2. This is another hassle for me because OS 9.1, which is the most stable and satisfactory OS for my WallStreet PowerBook, is not supported. I’ve been using OS 9.2.2, which works OK, except that it crashes on about every third wake-up from sleep on the WallStreet -- something that never happens in OS 9.1. OS 9.2.2 works reliably on the Pismo.

The intermittent crashing on wake-up with OS 9.2.2 gets old very quickly, especially for a user like me who goes through half a dozen or so sleep/wakeup cycles per day, so I figured it would be more sensible to just revert to using OS 9.0, which I still have installed on one of the hard drive partitions on my WallStreet, and which iListen 1.2.1 is supposed to support.

So, I booted into OS 9, installed the MacSpeech 1.2.1 extensions, restarted, and tried to start up iListen. It hung on the splash screen, requiring me to force restart the Mac.

OK, maybe iListen didn’t like being run from a system on a different partition. I ran the iListen 1.2 installer on the OS 9 partition and then the 1.2.1 updater, and tried again. Same result (hung on the splash screen and required a force reboot). iListen doesn’t seem to support OS 9.0 after all, on my machine at least, although iListen 1.0.1 worked fine on that same system. Possibly an extension conflict, although I didn’t change any extensions since 1.0.1 did work with that system, and I didn’t really have time to pursue it by trial and error, and just went back to using OS 9.2.2.

iListen 1.2.1 itself is reasonably stable, but will also occasionally crash if you feed it commands too rapidly while its working on something else.

I would certainly not have been able to go 15 days without a restart, as I recently did in OS 9.1, with iListen running (I was using ViaVoice Millennium Edition, which is solid as a rock stability-wise), had I been running iListen.

I have a love-hate relationship with iListen. In terms of features and functionality, it is the class of the field in the legacy Mac OS dictation software, making the two ViaVoice offerings look primitive and pedestrian by comparison. It is faster, more accurate, and the dictate-anywhere feature is a whole different dimension from ViaVoice’s capabilities in the legacy OS.

However, in terms of flexibility and stability, iListen still needs work. ViaVoice is not the most user-friendly application either, but once you get it set up, it works reliably and is stable. iListen has many virtues, but reliability, stability, and the voice correction feature especially, are not quite there yet.

I’m not inclined to belabor the OS 9.2.2 crashing issue on the WallStreet, as that is a separate glitch that manifested before I ever installed iListen, however, it would be great if I could get iListen to work with OS 9.0. ViaVoice has worked happily with all three versions of the Mac OS I have installed on the WallStreet.

iListen sucks up 68.4 MB of memory (VM on) n 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.

Then there’s OS X. Currently, ViaVoice for OS X is the high water mark in Mac dictation application software. It’s far from perfect, being plagued by installation hassles, and it breaks if I put my Mac to sleep without shutting ViaVoice down first. It requires that one use horrible USB audio input (iListen supports both analog or USB input). However, it is fast and accurate.

(The iListen Read Me also says 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 don;t want to have to boot up slow-starting iListen or ViaVoice X every time I wake the machine up. Whatever the difficulty here is with both programs, it needs fixing.)

MacSpeech is working on an OS X native product -- iDictate. iListen will not work in OS X Classic mode. I’ve tried an early Alpha build of iDictate, and it currently looks and functions very similarly to iListen. If they can make it stable, it promises to be the best OS X dictation software. iListen users will be able to purchase this product at a discount when it becomes available.

So, which dictation product do I recommend? For OS 9 users, despite my criticisms of iListen 1.2.1, I would still say that it’s now the best choice. ViaVoice development for the legacy Mac OS versions has stopped, while MacSpeech still intensively developing iListen. Another fractional version upgrade/bugfix is about to be released to beta testers, and I expect continued improvements. It’s really a very cool application.

Addendum: a point of clarification suggested by a longtime reader.

I have not tested the ViaVoice Enhanced Edition with the direct dictation option. For reviews of VVEE visit:

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/tech/691085
http://www.macdirectory.com/RVU/ViaVoice/
http://www.canadacomputes.com/v3/story/1,1017,3599,00.html?tag=81&sb=124

That version does not support my 233 MHz PowerBook (a 300 MHz G3 is the minimum supported), and the handful of applications supported for direct dictation, the most significant difference between Via Voice EE and ME, (AppleWorks, plus several Microsoft apps. and Netscape) are not ones that I use by preference. From what I hear, the ViaVoice direct dictation mode is pretty poky anyway, and you lose the text editing and correction functions in SpeakPad.

Based on those reviews,, I feel safe in deducing that iListen 1.2.1 is the better choice.

System requirements:
• Mac OS 9.0, 9.0.4, 9.2.1, 9.2.2 (Not compatible with Mac OS 9.1)
• If you are using a USB headset, you must use Mac OS version 9.0.4 or later in order for iListen to work properly.
• Requires a Power Macintosh G3 or Power Macintosh G4 computer with at least 128MB of RAM (iListen does not support the use of upgrade cards at this time)
• A USB or PlainTalk-compatible noise-canceling microphone is strongly recommended.

iListen sells for $99 ($19.95 upgrade) without a microphone headset.

You can download the iListen 1.2 upgrade here:
http://www.macspeech.com/upgrade.html

For more information, visit:
http://www.macspeech.com/

Appendix - What's New In iListen 1.2:

Performance.Dictation in iListen 1.2 is considerably faster than previous versions. Dictation is fast and reliable, even into Database Systems such as FileMaker Pro.

Stability. Core improvements have made the software more reliable than before

Command Set Editor. Editing is easier, you can drag and drop commands between Command Sets. We've also added the ability to Import and Export Commands, great for backups and for sharing new Commands between Profiles.

What Can I Say! Substantial Improvements in Performance makes this tool easier to use. The new User Interface facilitates using and finding those hard to remember Commands. You can double click a Command to use it, as well as using your Voice.

Typekey Helper. New and Improved for MacOS 9.2.2

Charles W. Moore

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