[MV] MacSpeech 1.6

[T. Patrick Henebry]

>How important is it to create a new voice profile from scratch to get full
>advantage of the 1.6 upgrade?


Though the read me file suggests creating a new profile in order to 
take full advantage of all the new features I have found that if you 
have a well trained profile it is not absolutely necessary. (In fact 
the way the read me file it makes you think that it is necessary to 
restore your old profile from backup after running the update if you 
want to avoid having to create a new profile. Not only is this not to 
the case, if you restored from an old profile after running the 
update you would indeed lose they commands related to the new 
features. So they really should rewrite that section.)

Having said that I think iListen will adapt faster to corrections if 
you do create a new profile, but I cannot be positive.

>
>(A quick look at the new correction features was very positive!).

They work quite well. New commands have been added that which allow 
you to effectively edit by voice as well (FINALLY!). The addition of 
they phonetic editor also makes a much easier when dealing with hard 
to train unusually spelled words. (Quite a bit has been included in 
the documentation about to the phonetic alphabet should you need to 
use it instead of letting iListen automatically create a new phonetic 
description for the word in question when using the phonetic editor. 
But so far, I have found that I have not needed to manually create a 
phonetic description of a word. The descriptions that iListen comes 
up with automatically while using the phonetic editor have all 
worked.) If you make a correction and the word is not already in the 
vocabulary the phonetic editor will activate automatically. This too 
is quite useful. A PDF file has been included which details the 
changes in version 1.6. It is well worth reading.

The ViaVoice is still the better choice in some situations iListen 
version 1.6 is truly a competitive product.

This message was dictated with:

15 inch LCD iMac with SuperDrive
800 MHz G4
768 MB RAM
VXI TalkPro Xpress connected to an Andrea Electronic USB pod
Mac OS X 10.2.6
iListen version 1.6.0
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T. Patrick Henebry