Apple's announcement of a new Spoken Interface

[T. Patrick Henebry]

Greetings!

Several customers have been emailing us asking how Apple's 
announcement of a new Spoken Interface 
<http://www.apple.com/accessibility/spokeninterface/> will impact 
them. We'd like to help you understand the importance of this new 
technology that is currently under development at Apple, as well as 
explain how it differs from the technology MacSpeech is using.

What Apple is developing is a "Spoken Interface" not a "Speech 
Interface." The difference is important. A Spoken Interface means the 
computer will talk to you. It will speak the names of buttons, menus, 
sliders, and other interface elements, providing the developer has 
followed Apple's guidelines when developing their software. What 
Apple is developing is similar to screen reader technology similar to 
those developed by other companies for Mac OS 9. You can get a hint 
of what this will be by doing the following (in Mac OS X 10.2 or 
later only):

1). Open your System Preferences and click on the Universal Access pane.

2). Make sure "Enable access for assistive devices" and "Enable 
text-to-speech for Universal Access preferences" are checked at the 
bottom of the window.

3). Now move your mouse over the buttons and text on the pane, 
pausing briefly over them. Your computer should speak the name of 
that control or text to you.

This is a Spoken Interface. Apple is going to introduce improvements 
to Mac OS X that make these features available system-wide.

It is important to note that this announcement does not mean Apple is 
providing features in the Mac OS that will allow them to change their 
speech into text (dictation), which is a "Speech Interface." For 
that, you will still need iListen.

Some of our customers have been surprised to learn that Apple already 
has a speech recognition system in Mac OS X capable of executing 
commands based on the user's speech. This system, referred to as 
"PlainTalk" in Mac OS 9 and "English Speech Recognition" in Mac OS X 
also does not handle dictation, only commands. iListen improves on 
Apple's implementation by including pre-defined commands via our 
exclusive ScriptPaks <http://store.macspeech.com/#ScriptPaks>. You 
can read an excellent overview of Apple's built-in speech recognition 
at <http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/03/17/speech.html>.

We are excited about Apple's new Spoken Interface and look forward to 
seeing how we can integrate its functionality into future versions of 
our products. If you have any further questions about speech on the 
Macintosh, please feel free to mail us at <questions at macspeech.com>.
-- 
T. Patrick Henebry
tphenebry at macspeech.com