[MV] Dictation Only VV?

[T. Patrick Henebry]

>I'll be using the speech recognition (SR) program on a Quicksilver 
>867MHz (single processor) machine running 10.2.3 (hopefully it will 
>soon be up to 10.2.6 if no major bugs appear soon).  I'm buying the 
>SR for business purposes (more on that in a second), but I'd also 
>like to try using it to dictate emails (I use Eudora, but don't care 
>too much if I have to use a solution that works with text outside 
>the target program, eg. SpeakPad).  The business purpose I want the 
>software for is dictating in letters, namely, DNA sequences like "A 
>C T T G C A."  (Yes, occasionally I have to type in a page of DNA 
>sequences, and it makes me go cross-eyed.)  So I'm wondering which 
>program (ViaVoice or iSpeech) is better suited to handling that type 
>of text entry?

Tom,

I have extensive experience with both iListen and ViaVoice for Mac OS 
X.  I have not used to the Simply Dictation product but the 
recognition engine is the same as the one in a ViaVoice for Mac OS X. 
Either product from IBM would be suitable for your needs.  I do not 
recommended that you use iListen for two reasons: it is extremely 
prone to scrambling text, and it can be very difficult or outright 
impossible to train iListen to properly recognize unusually spelled 
words. 

It is true that ViaVoice for Mac OS X comes with its own microphone. 
However, unless you are in a quiet environment the stock microphone 
may not be adequate.  For example if you are in a cubicle rather than 
your own office you would need a third party microphone with better 
noise canceling abilities. 

The best way to dictate the DNA sequences would be to put ViaVoice in 
spelling mode and then verbally spell the sequence letter by letter. 
You can easily switch back between a spelling mode and dictation mode 
should you need to alternate between dictating DNA sequences and 
regular text.  Though there are verbal commands for transferring 
dictated text between as SpeakPad and a few other applications I 
usually just do it manually.  

Be sure to get lots of memory, speech recognition likes both 
processor cycles and RAM.  (I have 768 MB in my Macintosh, and in 
some cases 1 gigabyte is not unreasonable depending on what other 
applications will be running at the same time.)
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T. Patrick Henebry