[MV] Speech Recognition Products (1)

[Chuck Rogers]

All:

I need to break this message into parts because of the listerver's 5K limit.

There have been a lot of product names bandied about in the past few posts, most of which are incorrect. Since there are some people who subscribe to the list because they are curious about speech recognition, but haven't yet tried it, I thought I would clarify what products are out there, what has been discontinued, and what are their actual names.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking: This is Nuance's flagship product and is the 800lb gorilla of the speech recognition market. It has been around forever and is widely accepted as the standard to which all others are compared. Dragon NaturallySpeaking is WIndows only, technically speaking, there is no Mac version.

Via Voice for Macintosh: This was IBM's sole Macintosh product and part of Steve Job's strategy to show Apple still is a credible choice for consumers (by getting big companies - such as IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, etc. to support the Mac). Via Voice for Macintosh used the same IBM speech engine as it's Windows counterpart. When IBM decided to get out of the consumer software business they cut a deal with Nuance to be the exclusive distributor of both the Windows and Mac versions of Via Voice until supplies were exhausted. Via Voice is no longer available on either platform.

iListen: This product was built from the ground up for the Mac and was sold by MacSpeech. It used the Philips Speech Recognition engine. When it came out, it was widely accepted to be *almost* as good as the version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking that was available at that time. MacSpeech did not have the resources to improve iListen at the same rate as Nuance did for NaturallySpeaking, so by the time it was replaced by MacSpeech Dictate in early 2008, Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows was accepted as a much better program. 

Chuck Rogers