No, Macintosh comes with a set of "Speakable Items" that are speaker independent and, if you turn them, you can launch applications, go to menus and perform a handful of other useful command and control tasks. Dictation, as in writing a document is only available in after market software - this is probably the only thing that I find Vista does a lot better than Mac as they've built in a quite good dictation utility.
I think the problems with MacSpeech Dictate is that it came over from Windows and uses the Nuance engine (a smart decision) but also seems to try to shoe horn the Windows UI into a Mac form and create a user experience that is good in some spots but horrible in others. If they would just try to follow the OSX UI guidelines, we'd have a kick ass dictation program for only $150 or so.
BTW: Does anyone know if anyone has ported Sphynx to Macintosh? I've never worked inside a dictation program and I'm neither a computation linguist nor a heavy duty Mac hacker so I can't even guess how to start such an endeavor but as it would be coming from the GNU world to the Mach based Mac platform it would probably be easier than porting something from Windows.
Happy Hacking, cdh On Jul 25, 2009, at 2:53 PM, Steve Hurd wrote:
Hi is the Mac dictation package part of the os? Ihave a few speach commands in the menus buth avn't used it yet so wondered if it is part of ilife, work 9 or something.Steve On 24/07/2009, at 12:00 PM, Chris Hofstader wrote:Thanks. On Jul 24, 2009, at 1:45 PM, Marty Rimpau wrote:Hi Chris, Steve Sawczyn did a demonstration of mac speech dictate on one of his programs, and you can go tohttp://www.atmain.com/showfor the archive of that show, and there, you might be able to obtain his email address.On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:13:17 -0400, Chris Hofstader wrote: Hi, I'm really struggling with MacSpeech Dictate. It does a terrific job recognizing speech but a number of features, including the "correct that" command that gives the user the ability to both fix an incorrect translation by the software and also add the term and its sound to its dictionary to improve recognition in the future. Some of the commands partially work but one can get stuck in a dialogue with no obvious or even obscure way out that I could find. I have two questions: >> Question 1: Is there a dictation program, even one with a lower >> quality out of the box, that works well with VO? > >> 2. Does anyone know of a VO user who is successfully using>> MacSpeach Dictate to make reasonably long documents? If so, please>> provide me with a contact so I might learn a few tricks. > Happy Hacking, cdh > > Click on the link below to go to our homepage. > http://www.icanworkthisthing.com >> Manage your subscription by using the web interface on the link below.> //www.freelists.org/list/macvoiceover > > Users can subscribe to this list by sending email to > macvoiceover-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > with 'subscribe' in the Subject field OR by logging into the Web > interface at //www.freelists.org/list/macvoiceover > Marty
