Microphones for iListen/some thoughts

[Marty Markoe]

Donald,
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The problem is the microphone, iListen doesn't support the Andreas - they do
not deliver enough gain to be used with iListen on Mac OS X.

Supported microphone/headset for iListen include:

-   Griffin iMic/VXi Parrot Translator
-   Telex H 841
-   Telex H 851
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Mike mentioned he is using a Buddy Gooseneck connected to Andrea USB sound pod. The Buddy Gooseneck has plenty of gain as it uses an Emkay hi gain microphone element.

The three microphones you mentioned as being supported to have hi gain. However, their poor noise cancellation characteristics impact accuracy. Andrea ANC microphones are the most popular microphone in the upgrade market for speech recognition software. I probably sell four times more Andrea headsets than all others combined. They do have a lower gain and score lower on signal to noise ratio tests due to the fact that they have two microphone elements. One element faces the mouth to sample your voice. The other element faces away from your mouth and samples incoming noise. This incoming noise is nulled out by the addition of electronic white noise from a small circuit in the on/mute box. It is the nature of this active noise canceling system that reduces the gain but increases accuracy tremendously over almost all other headsets. The only headset microphones we have found that come close are new VXI TalkPro models. These do have higher gain and I believe Patrick Henebry says they work quite well with iListen. Recommending the three microphones you support is a disservice in my opinion. It is like buying a high end finely tuned sports car and then using watered-down gas to drive around.

Realizing the limitations built in to the new iListen software I highly recommend the use of the VXI TalkPro microphone.

Martin Markoe, eMicrophones, Inc.
The best microphones for Speech Recognition
See us at: http://www.eMicrophones.com/index.asp 
See, "Key Steps to High Speech Recognition Accuracy for the Mac" at:
http://www.emicrophones.com/docDetails.asp?DocumentID=39