Voice Recognition Review: MacSpeech Dictate and RevoLabs xTag Wireless Microphone

6 Responses to Voice Recognition Review: MacSpeech Dictate and RevoLabs xTag Wireless Microphone

1. Robert Farvolden says:

   June 22, 2008 at 12:36 pm

   This was really helpful. Thanks very much
2. Robert Farvolden says:

   June 22, 2008 at 11:36 am

   This was really helpful. Thanks very much
3. Stan Winikoff says:

   September 2, 2008 at 7:27 pm

   I would have loved to have completed the switch from PC to Mac and the only indispensable program was voice dictation. I eagerly purchased Dragon dictate which I found out purchased the dictation engine used by Dragon but NOT the correction features. They rushed the program out to capture sales dollars but this will have the long term effect of having the product suffer from the inevitable and always negative comparison to Dragon naturally. Voice recognition is OK in fact. marco creation does not work more often than it does work. My recommendation to others has been to not buy dictate until the program gets better.
4. TomaszStasiuk says:

   September 2, 2008 at 8:01 pm

   The problem is, I do not have high hopes for Dictate adding “missing” features any time soon. The newsletters I receive are jut full of marketing speak and self praise. I can understand this from a marketing standpoint. But I am already a client! How about telling me when I can expect some improvement. MacSpeach is charging Dragon level prices, I expect comparable functionality.

   At this point, I find myself using Dictate infrequently.

   David Pouge's recent vidcast on the voice recognition built into Vista is just depressing for Mac users. That is a leap ahead of Macs!

   Maybe snow leopard will provide voice recognition, but since it not supposed to be a feature packed upgrade, I wont hold my breath.

   Vista today: voice recognition integrated in the OS
   Windows 7 (upcoming): built-in multi-touch.

   I love my Mac, but I hate to see Apple falling behind on features. Come on boffiins, lets get this sorted!
5. JimPowell says:

   September 26, 2008 at 8:00 am

   Excellent review.
   I am a long time Mac user who tried Via Voice (execrable) and iListen. I must have spent 40-50 hours trying to train iListen until I realized that it was uneducable–no matter how long I spent, it still missed the same words. I went to Boot Camp, then Parallels, then VM Fusion so I could run DNS, which is vastly better than iListen. With DNS 10, I get better than 99 % accuracy. But, I don't like having to switch back and forth between Mac and XP. How can it take MacSpeech 8 months to add a correction feature, when they had one in iListen (even though it did not work) and DNS has had one for donkey's years? This borders on false advertising.
6. JimPowell says:

   September 26, 2008 at 3:00 pm

   Excellent review.
   I am a long time Mac user who tried Via Voice (execrable) and iListen. I must have spent 40-50 hours trying to train iListen until I realized that it was uneducable–no matter how long I spent, it still missed the same words. I went to Boot Camp, then Parallels, then VM Fusion so I could run DNS, which is vastly better than iListen. With DNS 10, I get better than 99 % accuracy. But, I don't like having to switch back and forth between Mac and XP. How can it take MacSpeech 8 months to add a correction feature, when they had one in iListen (even though it did not work) and DNS has had one for donkey's years? This borders on false advertising.