ViaVoice Redux - iListen On The Way - More AppleScript Adventures - and iCab Just Gets Better And Better

ViaVoice Revisited

Several readers responded to my review of ViaVoice last week with suggestions about how I might improve the IBM dictation software's performance on my 233 MHz PowerBook. I have tried several of these fixes and I'm happy to report that they do speed up ViaVoice's performance somewhat. Dictation speed in particular is getting faster as I use the program more. However it still lags behind conversational speech by a wide margin, although I have to admit I'm getting addicted to continuous speech support.

With ViaVoice I can speak a phrase and then wait for the program to analyze and type it, rather than pausing between each individual word as is necessary with Voice Power Pro. This is more convenient and intuitive, although at this stage I would still give Voice Power Pro the speed edge. Continuing the comparison with Voice Power Pro, while continuous speech is cool, ViaVoice's inability to enter dictation directly into an application document or text field is not, and the hassle of first dictating into ViaVoice's SpeakPad editor and then transferring it via the clipboard to its intended destination (I don't regularly use any of the supported applications for direct transfer) makes editing especially clumsy and slow, so Voice Power Pro has the edge here as well.

I have increased ViaVoice's memory partition to 30 MB, which is nearly six times the minimum specified, and about three times the recommended partition. This may have speeded up things like window opening, program launch, and saves slightly, but there has been no dramatic improvement. One possible result of increasing the memory partition is that I have not experienced any more catastrophic loss-of-data crashes like the one I mentioned last week. However I have been religious about transferring dictated text to Tex Edit Plus every few paragraphs.

Reader Willis Morse wrote to suggest unchecking the "Save dictation session info" checkbox (which is on by default) in the "Save As" dialog. If you uncheck it, SpeakPad files will be saved without audio, which makes them smaller, and presumably more stable. I have done this, saves remain awfully slow. On the other hand, as noted, I have experienced no more program crashes since unchecking the box.

I suppose that perception of speed in dictation, that is: what is tolerable; is something of a subjective evaluation. In last week's article I said that I could probably type about three times as fast as ViaVoice could copy my dictation. I have now got the program speed improved to the point where I can probably type only twice as fast. I am counting the time it takes the to make corrections and transfer the text to its destination application in these rough estimates. ViaVoice's correction window works reasonably well, but it is another of the application's features that runs very slowly on my PowerBook 233.

Reportedly, IBM is listening intently to reports from beta testers, and is even paying $100 each to users who agreed to participate in a four-month ViaVoice-for-Mac improvement project that began in February. I'm hopeful that the speed and stability issues will be effectively addressed in the next version release of the program, and you may be able to transfer dictated text directly to a wider variety of applications, although I have not heard of any plans to make ViaVoice capable of copying dictation outside SpeakPad.

Let's hope that the user-feedback initiative yields some big improvements in ViaVoice 2, and IBM deserves full credit for being the first to bring continuous speech recognition to the Mac. Last month at the WebSphere 2000 Conference in Miami, Florida, W.S. "Ozzie" Osborne, general manager of IBM Voice Systems, noted that ViaVoice is the only speech recognition application that can be found on every significant computer platform -- from Windows to Macintosh to Linux.

I was also interested to note that unlike Apple, IBM believes that offering a U.K. English version of their software is worthwhile. This week MacUser U.K. published a review of the recently-released U.K. English version of ViaVoice for the Mac, which has a 100,000 word dictionary instead of the U.S, version's 64,000 words, properly spells the names of British public persons like Mo Mowlam, Steven Norris and Stephen Day, as well as UK place names with tricky pronunciations such as Somerset, Tyne and Wear. 'Full stop' is used instead of the American 'period' for sentence endings. "IBM has taken localization very seriously indeed," observes MacUser's Keith Martin , "and the result is a product which really understands the way the English language works in the UK."

To which I say, bravo IBM.

For more information about IBM Voice Systems visit:
http://www.ibm.com/software/speech

MacSpeech's iListen To Be Released At MacWorld Expo NY?

This week I heard from a reliable source at MacSpeech, who prefers anonymity, that the first version of iListen (which will be the first MacSpeech dictation product out the door) will be 100% carbon compliant. This means it will run under Mac OS X, which will increase the long term value of the program for early adopters. I was told that there is still some additional work to do to take advantage of Mac OS X's unique features, but currently it is anticipated that the first iListen release will work on Macs running Mac OS 8.6, 9.0x, and Mac OS X, and while minimum system requirements have not been determined as yet, it will definitely work on any G3 with at least 96mb of RAM.

Two MacSpeech engineers were sent to California for a "Carbon Coding Kitchen," and that has set the release date back 2-3 weeks, but the company feels the delay was worth it. My source said that current plans are to enter beta by June 1 and to ship at MacWorld New York. There may also be an Internet-only release before MacWorld.

As noted in the article last week, MacSpeech's iListen (and its high end sibling iDictate), will combine the two best features of ViaVoice and Voice Power Pro (continuous speech recognition and the ability to dictate into virtually any text window or field) in one program.

To check on the latest news from MacSpeech, visit:
http://www.macspeech.com

More AppleScript Adventures

A month ago in my column: "If You Haven't Tried AppleScript, You're Missing Something Insanely Great," I wrote about how much fun I was having customizing and tweaking Tex-Edit Plus with AppleScripts. I'm still having fun.

Thanks to AppleScripts, I now use Tex Edit Plus for virtually all of my word processing and html markup work, instead of word processor and html editor programs. Tex Edit Plus is lightning-fast, amazingly small at just 858k for the application, and operates happily with a 1024k memory partition. If you haven't tried this wonderful little program, head over to Tom Bender's Trans-Tex software site and download a copy of the latest 3.0.1 version. http://www.nearside.com/trans-tex/

Once you have TE+, pay a visit to visit Doug Adams' Tex Edit AppleScript archive, where you will find more than 150 prefabricated AppleScripts posted for free download and use with Tex-Edit Plus. Script categories include:

• Text & Character
• Document Conversions
• Window Manipulation
• Working With Files
• Printing
• HTML Authoring
• Search, Sort, Replace
• Fun Scripts
» Miscellaneous
• TE+ & Other Apps

If you're interested in doing html markup with Tex Edit Plus, you might find the little collection of nine AppleScripts I've written (such a grandiose word -- they're all just four or five vary short lines of code) for this purpose helpful. They are posted on Doug's AppleScript site under the name "HTML Suite," and include:

• Anchor - converts a URL into a Weblink
• Insert - makes selection boldface
• Insert- makes selection boldface and larger point size
• Insert - formats selection as blockquote
• Insert - centers selection
• Insert Break - inserts a line break
• mailto - converts email address to Weblink
• •/• - converts Mac bullets to standard HTML bullets
•to- converts paragraph tags within a selection to line break tags

This URL will take you directly to HTML Suite:
http://www.malcolmadams.com/te/scripts/scriptsmr.html#htmlsuite

I hope you find them as useful as I have.

Now if we could just get Tom Bender to make the Tex Edit Plus AppleScript menu convertible to a floating palette....

iCab Just Keeps Getting Better

Don't take my word for it. Mosey on over to MacFixit's iCab forum and check out the postings there.. Seems that hardly anybody doesn't like iCab. Even better, download a copy and see for yourself.

iCab just released the Preview 2.0 version of their browser this week. I've been using the non-public beta of this iCab build for about two weeks, and it is not only the best iCab ever, but also the slickest, fastest, most stable and polished browser available for the Mac -- period. This is the Mercedes-Benz of browsers.

New features in iCab Preview 2.0 include:
• Hotlist: folders can be opened in new windows, Import, Export
• Aborted downloads can be resumed
• Better JavaScript support (but still not finished)
• Support for automatic proxy configuration scripts
• and more...

As with Internet Explorer 5, you must download Apple's Java Virtual Machine For Macintosh for full Java support if you don't already have JVM. A link is provided on the iCab Download page.

I quite like iCab's clean, understated, un-busy appearance, but if you find it too austere for your tastes, iCab has posted a dozen or so alternate button skins on their download site, including an Aqua themed one. Just drop an alternate icon set in the iCab folder, and the program will load it automatically on startup. You can also make your own custom buttons using Res-Edit.

Like IE 5, iCab supports folders in the personal toolbar, not just individual URLs. The iCab application is a minuscule 3 MB and the entire iCab folder is only 3.4 MB (and that's on an HFS volume). Pretty amazing given iCab's sparkling performance.

System Requirements:
• Minimum 4MB free RAM
• System 7.0.1 or 7.1 if ThreadManager and DragManager are also installed
• System 7.5 or newer
• MacTCP or OpenTransport
• InternetConfig 1.2 (or Mac OS 8.5 or newer)
• PPC, 68020, 68030 or 68040
Other recommended software
• Apple's MRJ 2.0 or better for Java support in iCab (2.1 or newer recommended)
• QuickTime (3.0 or higher recommended) for media playback on the internet

Some other features in iCab:
• HTML 4.0 support
• Tag recognition for specific Netscape and Microsoft HTML enhancements (i.e <BLINK>, <MARQUEE>, <MULTICOL> and more).
• Flexible image filtering (for example banners)
• Flexible cookie filtering
• iCab can "bookmark" individual frames outside of their parent window
• iCab can generate an error report indicating syntax mistakes in the HTML source. This feature is especially interesting for people who design their own web pages.
• iCab can automatically reload web pages as soon as they are edited in a separate application. This eliminates the need to constantly switch to a browser to see the results in an edited web page.
• Auto-complete URLs in the address field
• Display Java-Applets with the help of Apples MRJ 2.0 or better.
• iCab can search through HTML files on your local hard drive or cache
• Multiple search engines are available directly from the internet search option in iCab
• Import web archives (and cache) from Internet Explorer
• Download Manager
• Hotlist (Bookmarks), History
• MacOS 8.5 Appearance savvy
• Support for Navigation-Services, Contextual menus and proportional scrolling (MacOS 8.5)
• Create web archives in ZIP-Format (download complete web sites)

This preview 2.0 build of iCab will expire in August 2000. The final release of iCab or another preview build will be available before then. The final full version of iCab will sell for $29, but a free "lite" version will continue to be offered.

For some interesting insights into the status of the iCab project and the philosophy behind it, check out this MacWelt interview with iCab developer Oliver Joppich:
http://www.macwelt.com/action.lasso?-database=comnews.fp3&-layout=detail.lay&-response=detail.lasso&-recid=68&-search

Mr. Joppich notes that the final version of iCab will be released when the development team is "satisfied with it," and that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) a complete Inscript (Javascript for iCab), the DOM 1 kernel and XML 1.0 will all be implemented, as well as 128 bit encryption eventually.

You can download iCab preview 2.0 at:
http://www.icab.de/download.html

Charles W. Moore

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Saturday, 26-May-2012 16:32:43 EDT