The voice training takes only a few minutes for the software to recognize your voice and adapt to it. After the initial training, you can continue voice training for even more accurate recognition of your voice. I did notice that when I caught a cold during this review, the voice-recognition wasn’t as accurate. When this happened, I simply made a new user profile and re-trained the software to recognize my voice again. So now I have two user profiles: one for my normal voice, and one for my nasally congested voice. MacSpeech Dictate can have profiles for multiple users as well.

Version 1.5 is the most recent update of MacSpeech Dictate and has increased the recognition accuracy by 20%, and has added some new features including a vocabulary editor. This update is better for dictating atypical words, acronyms and names.

A nice feature of MacSpeech Dictate is that the user can continuously speak without pauses, as was necessary in older speech recognition software, letting the words flow as fast as you can speak them. As well as being able to speak continuously, feel free to use your natural conversational voice. No need to over enunciate nor put unnatural pauses in your speech.

If you’re working in a very noisy environment, the noise canceling microphone that is included in the package, made by Plantronics, cancels out all background noise that could possibly interfere with your voice, including music. So if you like listening to music while you work, then it’s not a problem.

There are four modes to MacSpeech Dictate including dictation mode, command mode, spelling mode, and sleep mode. Dictation mode is exactly that, the mode in which you dictate words to your text documents, etc. Command mode lets you issue commands to your Mac applications such as Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, QuarkXPress, iChat, Mail, TextEdit, Keynote, and more. Spelling mode allows you to spell out words, names, and acronyms. Sleep mode is a way for you to turn the microphone on and off while working.

An extremely helpful feature in MacSpeech Dictate is the Phrase Training. If you use a lot of words and acronyms that are unique to the work you’re doing, phrase training can help you a lot. Say for example, you’re writing a document about TextEdit software. When you say  The words “text” and “edit," it is likely to be typed out as two separate words with the “t” and “e” in lower case, which would look like this: text edit. With phrase training you can have MacSpeech Dictate recognize your speech as the name of the software “TextEdit," and type it accordingly, so it will look like this: TextEdit. You can also keep the words “text” and “edit” separate so long as you put a slight pause between the two words. This is extremely powerful and is a great time saver when writing using a lot of atypical words and acronyms.

So if you are someone that physically can’t type, have difficulty typing, can’t type for long hours, are a slow typist, or just need your hands-free from typing, then MacSpeech Dictate is exactly what you need. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

 

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Stephen Allen has a Bachelor of Science degree in mass communication from Towson University in Maryland. He is also a graduate of Sheffield Institute’s Videoworks program. He has been working in the video production field for over 11 years as an editor, director and videographer. 

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