[MV] Re: Fwd: Voice activation

[Tara Star]

Chuck Rogers wrote:
> Pete (and everyone else):
> 
> Comparing iListen to Dragon in a magazine would be fruitless. Besides 
> the fact that the audience for such a comparison is narrow (those 
> deciding whether to use a Mac or a PC who need speech recognition), 
> iListen would come out way behind.
> 
> Dragon has an extremely mature engine that has been undergoing 
> consistent development for a very, very, very long time. The MacSpeech 
> engine, while based on the Philips engine, is uniquely Macintosh. An 
> extensive amount of "remodeling" had to be done for the engine to be 
> viable on the Macintosh. In comparison, Dragon has been able to add 
> considerable bells and whistles while all the while making improvements 
> to the speech engine while we have been struggling to keep up with a 
> dramatically different OS from our first version (OS 9 vs. OS X), and 
> are just now getting to the point we can implement many of the features 
> that have been on the top of our most requested features list.

Hope you'll forgive me for replying to this very old mail. I'm sure all 
this has already been thought through (and I'm no software engineer, so 
I'll probably sound very naive) -- but how much work would it be for 
ScanSoft to port Dragon over to the Mac? Or how much work would it be to 
integrate their speech engine into iListen? (probably loads, I know... 
I'm just desperately trying to make the universe come up with an 
alternate solution than getting a Windows computer to be able to dictate 
in French...)

Steph