[MV] can anyone help me?

[T. Patrick Henebry]

>Can anyone suggest anyplace to solve my problem? I have a iMac with 
>OS 10.1.5, Via Voice for Mac X, and an Olympus DS2000 digital voice 
>recorder. Olympus provides DSS Player a software program that allows 
>me to download my voice files from the recorder to my Mac in aiff or 
>dss formats and play them back.
>But I want to import them into Via Voice so that they can be 
>converted to type. Both Olympus and Sony, and perhaps others, are 
>selling the digital voice recorders bundled with Via Voice or Dragon 
>Naturally Speaking. But IBM doesn't support the process and no one 
>at Olympus seems to have a clue.
>How do I get Via Voice to recognize my aiff or dss voice files so 
>they can be converted to text?

You don't, at least not on a Mac.  The ability has to be written into 
the speech recognition software--and it isn't with the Mac versions 
of ViaVoice.

Currently on the Mac only iListen supports the use of digital 
recorders.  BUT since there is no way to train the software using the 
digital recorder you must train a user with a regular microphone. 
Any corrections to recognition errors (and there will be a 
significant number because of the inability to train with the 
recorder along with digital recorders being inherently less accurate) 
must be done manually.  NOTE: corrections must be done manually on a 
PC as well; but since they tie into a user trained with the digital 
recorder the overall accuracy improves more.

On the PC side ViaVoce Advanced, ViaVoice Pro, NaturallySpeaking 
Preferred, and NaturallySpeaking Professional all support the use of 
digital recorders.  More importantly they all *allow you to train the 
software by using the digital recorder*.  This improves accuracy 
quite a bit.  However, even at there best digital recorders are 
inherently less accurate then a regular headset microphone.  with 
considerable time and effort you MIGHT be able to get 95% accuracy on 
a PC.  I seriously doubt you could come close to that with iListen 
until they include the ability to train the software with the digital 
recorder.  The January Macworld has a review of iListen 1.5.2 (which 
you DO NOT want to use under 10.1.x because of correction problems, 
if you do just use it to get text in either with a microphone or 
recorder then do everything else by hand).  In it they say they only 
got 77% accuracy with a digital recorder.  That's a lot of 
recognition errors to fix.  (NOTE: they also say they got a pretty 
low number using a microphone.  I suspect at least in the case of the 
microphone the reviewer had training problems as I get about 97% 
accuracy with a microphone.  the 77% number for the recorder is 
believable due to the inability to train with it.)

If you must use a digital recorder A PC is a better option at this 
time.  Now whether to get ViaVoice or NaturallySpeaking depends on 
the type of work you will be doing with the software.
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T. Patrick Henebry