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Correction

• Typing speed control added to Correction window. The Typing Speed control setting is specific to each application.

• When you select “Update this Window” after Correction, the document you just finished correcting will be analyzed for unknown words and they will be automatically added to your voice profile.

• Added speech control to correction Window. Now you can dictate, command and spell in the correction window. While the correction window is open, all dictation and spelling goes into the Choice 1 field whether that field is selected or not. Normal dictation commands all apply to that field (such as “Go to Beginning”, “Go to End”, “scratch that”, “scratch word”, “Edit Select All”, etc..

Command mode works the same way, dictation oriented commands apply to the Choice 1 field, all other commands operate normally. There is a new set of commands - Correction Commands that are active only when the correction window is open (currently they do appear in the What Can I Say window while in normal dictation mode, but they will not work- this will be fixed.) The Correction Commands let you press all the buttons in the correction window. The typical rule is to say “Press”, then the name of the button. So to choose the third alternative you would say “Press 3”. There are two additional “buttons” that are not visible: “Press Move Home” and “Press Move End”. These two “buttons” move the selection to the home or end of the text that you are correcting. The sliders have the following commands: “Increase Correction Delay”, “Decrease Correction Delay”, “Increase Dictation Typing Delay”, “Decrease Dictation Typing Delay”.

• Added “Delete” functionality to Correction Window. Either say “Press Delete” or press the delete button to delete the current selection.

• Return / Enter keys “press” the “1” button when the correction type in edit box is selected.

- Correction window is slightly larger (800 x 600) and the font size of all items has been increased to make them easier to see.

- Phonetic Editor added to Correction

• Removed the navigation arrow buttons in the correction window. There are voice commands and control keys: Arrow keys, Home key, End key and Shift Key do work as they should.

• Correcting Pronunciation - the Phonetic Editor. Some words just don’t get recognized, no matter what you do. Now the phonetic description of those words can be modified to fix this problem. There is a file in the Documentation folder that describes how to use this new feature. Please read and comment on it. You can dictate/spell/type into the text edit boxes on this panel!

• If you type with the “correct this” pane as the focus, the keystrokes go into the “1” box. Return key and enter key press the “1” button.

• Tab key toggles the focus between the “Correct This” pane and the “to this” pane.

• Those pesky select commands: Do Search, Do Search Backwards, Do Select, Do Select backwards. While in dictation mode: say the command, pause and then say what you want selected in the text. This works directly in the document you are dictating into as well as in the Correct this pane of the Correction Window.

Do Search and Do Search backwards operate from the “current” location of the cursor.

Do Search, searches forward from the current cursor position. Do Search backwards, searches backwards from the current cursor position. Do Select, searches forward from the beginning of the document. Do Select backwards, searches backwards from the end of the document.

• Copy/Paste Checkbox in the Correction Window. This is primarily for correcting large amounts of dictated text after using transcription from a digital recorder. This checkbox is document specific - the setting is unique to each dictated document. When this checkbox is checked, the document is only updated after you press the “Done” button. The text in the document is updated by: “Edit select All”, Paste. So any text that is not dictated is lost. This includes text dictated into the document before a “commit corrections” command. So ONLY use this checkbox when you want ALL the text in the document replaced. It is much faster than the normal mode, but does not tolerate any non-dictated text.

• Enhanced Acoustic Adaptation in correction. Using a more aggressive algorithm to adapt the voice profile to your actual voice. Correction should learn faster as a result of this (if Phonetic spelling is incorrect because of odd or compound words, you need to correct that first, then the acoustic adaptation will have a positive effect.)

• Modified text in Auto Learn section of Correction panel in Preferences. Added “(does not ask)” to clarify the “Learn when Quitting” checkbox.

• Added “No Spaces On” checkbox to correction window to support correcting. This checkbox turns on “no spaces” when a correction is applied to the document.

• Playback of dictated words improved in Correction Window. It is less likely to get out of sync as you dictate, correct and speak commands. It will still get out of sync if you insert dictation into currently dictated text vs just appending.

• Ask Adapt window responds to return key, enter key or escape key via keyboard.

• If a new word is detected during correction, word choices panel automatically switches to the Phonetics panel so you can complete adding the new word by checking the phonetic spelling and then pressing “Set Phonetic”.

• If you are adding a word that is made up of smaller words, then put a space between each smaller word and press “Create Phonetic” button to recreate the phonetic - TextEdit would be “Text Edit”, “ARCserve” would be “arc serve”. (well actually this is nothing new, it is in the Phonetic Editor docs I sent out earlier.)

• Correction Window button name changes. Changed “Standard” to “Create Phonetic”, “Change Phonetic” to “Set Phonetic”, “No Spaces On” to “No Leading Space”.

• The “No Leading Space” checkbox lets you control the “no spaces” flag in the document while you are correcting. This allows what you are correcting to have no leading space. The “no spaces on” / “no spaces off” commands are going to affect what you are dictating in the correction window and that state is reflected by the “NS” button in the upper right of the Correction window.

Learn My Writing Style

• Added phonetic editor to Learn My Writing Style so you can modify automatically created phonetic spelling if necessary instead of having to wait until doing correction.

• RTF text files are interpreted by the Learn My Writing Style function. This is the default format from TextEdit and can be generated by many programs.

• Fixed problems with Learn My Writing Style HTML analysis, multiple file processing, long name display (greater than 31 chars).

• Learn My Writing Style initial screen text changed to include warning to please read the documentation.

Commands

• Fixed Mouse Click, double click AppleScript commands

• Mouse Move AppleScript should work for absolute mouse locations.

• Fixed capitalization of first word when dictating in correction window to reflect the state the word ought to be based on what is selected for correction in the correction window.

• Renamed “Sample Text Macros” to “Dictation Text Macros” and made it active during Dictation mode. This automatically happens for all your existing voice profiles and new voice profiles will start out this way.

• Created OS specific folders for command sets. This should be a transparent change to you, but now we can introduce command sets that are specific to either Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and not have file naming problems.

• Added enhancement to embedded command recognition to minimize “typing” of embedded command names.

• Added “Undo Dictation” and “Redo Dictation” commands so now you can undo the last dictation you said and undo the last dictation command you did. Redo undoes the affect of the “Undo Dictation” command.

• Fixed capitalization after a dictated ‘:’. So now every word after a colon is not capitalized, only those that are normally capitalized such as “I”.

• Fix for hyphen. Added “no spaces on”, “no spaces off” commands to provide work around for hyphen so you can turn off the leading space normally placed before each word.

• Improved recognition of embedded commands.

• Dictation said immediately before or immediately following an embedded command is no longer lost.

• Embedded commands execute immediately, so “caps on (pause) this is text (pause) caps off (pause) not capitalized” should put initial caps on the first piece of text and not the second.

- Reminder: First load of any command set takes longer than subsequent loads. Commands are cached even though they are not active.

• Changed alphabetization in user popup menu in commands window to be increasing order, not decreasing order.

• Application specific command set activation is faster after 1st time.

- Fixed application specific command loading so it happens the first time. You don’t have to click on another application and then back again to get the commands to load.

• Fixed Capitalize That command - did not capitalize word immediately preceding the cursor as it should have.

• Scratch That did not do anything sometimes or deleted too much or too little sometimes. Fixed these situations.

• Added “no space” and caps mode controls to correction window to simplify correction of dictation to create compound words. If “no space” is on when dictating the corrected words, then no space is inserted between the words in the Choice 1 text box. Caps mode popup menu also affects the Choice 1 text box. These controls provide a manual method as well as visual feedback of the already present verbal commands: no space on, no space off, caps on, caps off, upper case/lower case commands.

We have modified the version number of the current command sets so all current command sets will be renamed OLDxxxx and disabled. This will automatically occur when your voice profile is loaded. We have separated out some of the command sets as Mac OS 9 specific and some are Mac OS X specific. We have created a Finder command set for Mac OS X and for Mac OS 9. So if you have any modifications of the command sets, you will need to copy them from the “OLDxxx”. Once you are done with the OLDxxx files, delete them.

• Updated the Mac OS X command sets and separated 9 from X.

• Command sets for the operating system that is not active are not displayed in the command sets window.

Spelling Mode

• Spelling mode now supports hi ascii characters.

Language Support

• After installing a LanguagePak Setup My Microphone has the proper language displayed every time it is opened.

Microphone Support

• Microphone arbitration change in Mac OS X. Apple introduced a new feature that allows programs to share the microphone, we support that mechanism now.

What Can I Say

• Commands are now grey in the What Can I Say window when they are inactive instead of disappearing.

General

• Bug Fix. Microphone now always shuts off correctly.

• Bug Fix: Scratch That command non-functional sometimes.

• Fixed circumstance of getting stuck in “Pausing Dictation” mode.

• Disabled “Speakable Items” for Mac OS X because Apple changed the file format from an AppleScript to a private format.

• Various bug fixes in many places where high ascii characters not properly supported. Any place that a high ascii character needs to be typed using multiple keytrokes we have to introduce several delays to allow Mac OS X to react, otherwise weird stuff happens. None of this should make a difference to US English.

• Euro Sign is typed correctly.

• Check for whether the Access for Assistive Devices is turned on in the Universal Access preferences panel and put up a warning message if it is not.

• Crash fix - If you Attempt to Paste Document or Correct on an empty document.

Preferences

• Preferences Panel. The application specific preferences have been moved to here.

Dock Menu

• Added Windows menu items to the Dock menu so can turn WCIS and Feedback windows on/off from the Dock menu.

• Feedback and Correction windows do not overlap the Dock window. You can still override this though. If you have Dock Hiding on, the automatic positioning code does not work (OS limitation).

• Switched “Learn When Quitting” flag to default to false, so new users don’t end up with unanticipated changes.

Feedback Window

• Added display of capitalization and “no space” flags to feedback window so it is easier to deal with “no space” command.

• Added to the Feedback window, the display of current window name that iListen is monitoring to help determine that iListen is monitoring that window. Prefix the window name with “W--”. If no window is being monitored then “U:-” and voice profile name are displayed.

• Better feedback when iListen is typing a correction - Correct This pane and Choice buttons pane are disabled while typing is happening.

Voice Profiles

• Fixed bug in back up voice profile where if you back up a voice profile and iListen is attempting to overwrite a previous back up, the back up failed.

• Fixed bug where enter key or return key did not dismiss the “Update voice profile” dialog box.

Training

• Fixed an Initial Training bug that primarily affects non-US English, although retraining US English voice profiles may see some benefit.

• Changed text in Learn My Voice screen from “about a minute” to “up to a few minutes”. The time involved is dependent upon the length of the story, the machine speed and the version of the operating system. So it really goes from less than a minute to a lot more than a minute.

• New training stories for UK English. A couple minor modifications to US English training stories.

New In Mac OS 9 version of iListen - 1.5.5

The Mac OS 9 version of iListen in this release is 1.5.5. iListen on Mac OS 9.2.2. has not kept pace with the development of iListen 1.6 for Mac OS X. The new advanced features of iListen 1.6 are not available on Mac OS 9.2.2

This is likely to be the last Mac OS 9 based release of iListen.

iListen 1.5.5 Changes

• Fixed a problem that caused issues for non US-English training.

• Added some of the correction voice adaptation changes from the Mac OS X version of iListen, so iListen will learn faster, but still not as fast as the Mac OS X version.

• Fixed application specific command loading so it happens the first time. You don’t have to click on another application and then back again to get the commands to load.

Charles Moore Reviews iListen 1.6

Appendix 1 - iListen 1.6 Feature Summary

Charles W. Moore

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