[MV] Re: MacSpeech 1.6

[T. Patrick Henebry]

>>The ViaVoice is still the better choice in some situations iListen 
>>version 1.6 is truly a competitive product.
>
>
>What situations would you say those are?

Spidra,

First off let me apologize for the delay in responding to your very 
important question.

ViaVoice has advantages over iListen in the following situations:

Documents which require the frequent use of text macros or text 
entered through the use of spelling mode. Currently iListen does not 
properly track text entered into a document by either of these means. 
This can lead to problems later when either editing or correcting 
recognition errors (basically the document text gets scrambled). 
There is a work around for this involving using the "Commit 
Corrections" command. However doing so the means you lose the ability 
to edit by voice any text dictated prior to the use of this command. 
It also means you must issue extra commands before resuming dictation 
since by default there will be no space between the previously 
dictated text and the new text; in addition to this the first word 
dictated will be capitalized. So for example, even with the new 
improvements, iListen would not be appropriate for the gentleman who 
wished to use speech recognition to dictate DNA sequences. And I 
myself do not use iListen if I am going to be dictating a document 
that frequently contains Unix commands since this requires either 
text macros or the use of the spelling mode.

Since iListen lacks the ability to save audio data it isn't 
appropriate for documents that you cannot complete in a single 
dictation session. Once you exit iListen (or issue the "Commit 
Corrections" command) all audio data prior to that point is lost. 
This means you could not go back at a later date and either edit or 
correct recognition errors in the previously dictated text by voice. 
Since I depend on speech recognition due to problems with my hands we 
ViaVoice is definitely a necessity in this situation.

A legal or medical professional can take advantage of specialized 
vocabularies available for ViaVoice. These vocabularies can both 
tremendously increase accuracy and shorten training time for those 
who use them. This definitely makes it worth considering the ViaVoice 
instead of iListen for such professionals. For information on these 
vocabularies see:

<http://www-3.ibm.com/software/speech/mac/osx/vocabs.html>

When it comes to command-and-control ViaVoice provides the user to 
options should they wish to create their own voice commands: 
keystroke macros (which do have some limitations) or AppleScript. By 
contrast iListen is entirely dependent upon AppleScript for creation 
of voice commands. This makes ViaVoice a better choice for those who 
want to create their own voice commands but do not know, or wish to 
learn, AppleScript.

Finally, a user may occasionally encounter program which simply does 
not were quell with iListen. In which case ViaVoice is the only other 
option for speech recognition under OS X.

This e-mail was dictated with the following:

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