[MV] (no subject)

[Joseph Senecal]

On Aug 31, 2008, at 7:06 AM, wolfgang unger wrote:

> why don't you just come up with a simple deal like the old power  
> secretary?it worked perfectly,and i do not mind to pause after each  
> word.keep it simple,stupid..

I used PowerSecretary up until the first Intel Macs were released.  
While I was able to use it, I found it to be full of bugs that I  
reported but were never fixed. I managed to find workarounds (mostly a  
long list of things not to do) for most of the bugs to keep the  
product usable. While iListen and Dictate are not perfect, I find both  
to be far more stable than Power Secretary ever was.

Over the years I've used PowerSecretary, ViaVoice (both OS 9 and OS X  
versions), iListen (both OS 9 and OS X versions), and Dictate. I don't  
think PowerSecretary was ever modified since OS 7. It worked on OS 8,  
and another company came out with a patch to let it work on OS 9. But  
it was always unstable and could cause crashes just from being  
installed. ViaVoice was stable enough while it was being developed,  
but changes in OS X after development was dropped have made it  
increasingly hard to get to work. The MacSpeech products developed  
slower than IBM's, but they have always delivered on what they  
promised. I remember that there was a considerable delay between the  
initial release of iListen and the release of correction. But it was  
released as soon as it could be developed and made solid. And it was  
shipped free to everyone who had ordered the original iListen. Overall  
Macspeech has shipped more free updates and had the fewest paid  
updates of any company I can think of.

While PowerSecretary worked for you and I, many found the pauses  
between words disrupting. But the pauses between words don't make the  
integration problems simpler, just the recognition process. Today's  
computers don't require that limitation to recognize words more  
accurately that PowerSecretary ever did.

Joe Senecal