[MV] MacSpeech Dictate

[Chuck Rogers]

All:

Sorry I have not posted to the list sooner - it has been a very busy  
Macworld, as you can imagine!

By now, most of you probably know, we announced a new product at  
Macworld Expo this week - MacSpeech Dictate. I wanted to give you some  
of the details about this exciting new product.

- MacSpeech Dictate is NOT "Dragon on the Mac" anymore than iListen  
was "Philips on the Mac." Yes, we are using the incredible Dragon  
NaturallySpeaking speech engine, but that is where the resemblance  
stops. Basically, we feed the audio into the engine, and text comes  
out. What is done with the text is 100% Macintosh code written by us.  
Not one line of code from any of Dragon's software programs or from  
iListen is used in this new program.

- MacSpeech Dictate is Intel only, but it will work on any Intel-based  
Macintosh running Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher with at least 1GB of RAM.

- MacSpeech Dictate will ship with 6 versions of English: US, UK,  
Australian, Indian, Southeast Asian, and Teen.

- Later this year we will be releasing versions for French, German,  
Italian, and Spanish.

- Later this year we will be releasing Medical and Legal vocabularies.

- Training literally takes only 5 minutes for most people. Those with  
unique vocal characteristics or accents that do not fall into one of  
the regional English language models may need to read another story or  
two to achieve maximum accuracy, but even for those folks, accuracy  
will be better than a fully trained profile in iListen after only 5  
minutes of training.

- MacSpeech Dictate 1.0 will ship in mid-February. It's retail price  
will be $199. Anyone who already has iListen can crossgrade to the new  
program for $99. Through next Friday, we are running a Macworld Expo  
crossgrade special for existing iListen owners: $79 plus shipping.  
This is a special offer that expires next Friday and is a pre-order.  
There will not be a download option because the program installs over  
1GB of data on your hard drive. It will be possible to download  
upgrades, however.

- Due to the switch to a new engine, we are no longer shipping copies  
of iListen. iListen is available in retail stores and online through  
many outlets, including the Apple store. iListen remains a viable  
option for anyone running non-Intel-based Macs.

We are thrilled about this new product. I have been doing demos on the  
show floor every day, and even though my voice is getting hoarse, I am  
still getting near 100% accuracy even when the show floor is noisy!

I'd like to stress that MacSpeech Dictate is a 100% Mac-only program,  
written from the ground up for Mac OS X. I hope I have answered most  
of your questions. If not, please feel free to either email me  
personally at chuck.rogers at macspeech.com or post to the list. Keep in  
mind I am at Macworld Expo and may not be able to reply right away.


Best Regards,

Chuck Rogers, Chief Evangelist
MacSpeech, Inc.