[MV] Re: Fwd: Voice Activation

[Damien Fox]

that's sad...  Dragon is far and away the best, on any platform.   
good enough i've bought a PC JUST for VR. i love my mac, but ilisten  
just isn't there yet for me.  try dragon, see what i mean.  i'll  
booting WinXP on my mac soon (10mths?), tho', so it'll be a little  
less painful.

Still, I hate Windows with the passion, and I'm only using it for  
voice recognition, and don't want to hook it up to the Internet for  
fear of of viruses and so on.

The solution, then, is to make iListen as good as we possibly can,  
and find ways to get more people involved making it better.

Any suggestions?


-damien fox



On Aug 13, 2005, at 11:19 AM, Chuck Rogers wrote:

>
> Steph (and everyone else):
>
> The amount of work involved would be tremendous. Dragon originally  
> announced their intention to bring NaturallySpeaking over to Mac OS  
> X and then abandoned the project before even getting to the beta  
> stage due to a). the amount of work involved; and b). the  
> relatively low return on investment.
>
> Think of it this way: imagine you have two makes of cars in the  
> world, and only two. There is a model that will travel on any  
> surface street or state highway, but can't go on Interstates and  
> freeways. We'll call this the Microsoft car. Then you have a really  
> cool car that runs super fast, and hardly ever breaks down, and is  
> a lot easier to use, but it only runs on Internstates and freeways,  
> no surface streets or state highways. This is called the Apple.
>
> Everyone wants the Apple, but most don't buy it because they don't  
> think it will get them where they want to go. So they buy the  
> Microsoft car. In fact, over 90% of the cars made are Microsoft  
> cars. OK, along comes a third party that makes parts for cars. They  
> make this super-cool add on that allows the car to get 100 miles  
> per gallon instead of 20. The problem is, the two cars are  
> engineered so differently that it would require about the same  
> amount of effort to make one for the Apple car as it would for the  
> Microsoft car. In addition to that, it would virtually double the  
> company's overhead, since to be successful they would have to hire  
> new engineers that new how to build parts for the Apple (they  
> already have tons of Microsoft engineers), new marketing people,  
> since those who buy Apples cars think differently from those who  
> buy Microsoft cars, and new support people, since the way things  
> are implemented on the Apple side of things are so much different.
>
> All of the sudden, the Apple car company says they are going to buy  
> their parts from the same company that makes parts for most of the  
> Microsoft cars. So the picture looks brighter, right? Nope. They  
> are in the same boat, with the same amount of work to do because  
> the Apple car company has a special way that all those parts work  
> together. So while the performance of the Apple cars may go up, and  
> the relative cost may go down due to economies of scale for the  
> parts themselves, the amount of work necessary for the parts  
> manufacturer to integrate his stuff into the car doesn't change.
>
> OK - so with that general analogy, I hope you can see the problem.  
> Over 9 out of every 10 speech recognition packages sold on Windows  
> are some version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. If it were less - say  
> they sold even 50% - they might see a benefit from doing a Mac  
> product. But maintaining 90% of the market share on the Windows  
> side takes a lot of work, so they view the Macintosh opportunity as  
> a diversion, where we at MacSpeech live or die by our software.  
> Fortunately, we must be doing something right, since the reviews  
> lately have been pretty good.
>
> Steph, I know how badly you want French - and we want to provide it  
> just as badly. But until we find a workaround for our current  
> technical issues, it just ain't gonna happen.
>
>
>
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Chuck Rogers, Chief Evangelist
> MacSpeech, Inc.
>
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