MWSF: Goodbye, iListen, hello, MacSpeech Dictate
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jan 15, 2008 at 1:45pm
Forget iListen. MacSpeech, a provider of speech recognition solutions for the Mac, and Nuance Communications, developers of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, have announced an agreement to bring the world’s best speech recognition solution to Mac users worldwide, says Andrew Taylor, president and CEO of MacSpeech,
MacSpeech has licensed underlying dictation technology from Nuance Communications for its new MacSpeech Dictate product. MacSpeech replaces iListen. In fact, not a stitch of code from iListen remains in MacSpeech Dictate, Taylor says. The new product has a new engine, new name, new pricing, new code and a new team of engineers.
“MacSpeech, Inc. is the authority on speech recognition for the Macintosh,” says Smith. “Nuance provides an exceptional dictation technology engine that lets us focus on what we do best, which is to provide the user experience Macintosh users expect. Nuance is a class organization with a best of breed technology, and frankly we’re thrilled to work with them to bring great speech recognition software to the Mac.”
MacSpeech is conducting live demonstrations of its upcoming MacSpeech Dictate product at this week’s Macworld Conference & Expo. With the software, Mac users can begin dictating straight into their applications with very little time spent training the software to recognize their voice, Taylor says. Training MacSpeech Dictate, up to a 99 percent accuracy level, generally takes less than five minutes.
“MacSpeech Dictate performs at the highest accuracy level on the market today,” Taylor says. “Using the new MacSpeech Dictate, user-spoken commands are recognized separately from dictation, liberating the user from the need to tell the software to change modes, simplifying the experience.”
MacSpeech Dictate requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher, and requires Intel-based Macs. New MacSpeech Dictate solutions with a choice of headsets, will be priced starting at US$199 and is expected to ship by Feb. 15. Registered customers of iListen will be eligible to purchase MacSpeech Dictate a special crossgrade price of $99.
Upon distribution of MacSpeech Dictate to retail outlets, the iListen product will be immediately discontinued. Anyone who purchased the MacSpeech product, iListen, in 2008, can crossgrade to MacSpeech Dictate for $29 through April 15.
ScriptPaks that worked with iListen should continue to work with MacSpeech Dictate.
“Apple’s commitment to accessibility is evident throughout Mac OS X, including such ground-breaking features as VoiceOver, our built-in screen reader,” says Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “We’re delighted that Mac OS X users now have access to advanced speech-to-text dictation technology from MacSpeech, which nicely complements VoiceOver.”
The “Macsimum MWSF 2007 Coupon Book” is available for download. You can find it here and print it as a PDF. It has discounts, special offers and promotions in conjunction with the upcoming Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.
medicis Says:
Brothers..... just kidding. Am looking forward to trying it.
Posted on January 16, 2008
Timothy Arends Says:
“Anyone who purchased the MacSpeech product, iListen, in 2008, can crossgrade to MacSpeech Dictate for $29 through April 15.”
For those who purchased iListen in 2007 or earlier the crossgrade price is $100, still not bad, and you should be able to use your old headset.
Posted on January 17, 2008
lantzn Says:
Hopefully we will now get Mac compatible bluetooth headsets for speech recognition. Everything I looked at only worked for music and listening. Apple bluetooth 1.5 info page says it doesn’t work with speech recognition. I bought Rosetta Stone to learn Spanish and would like to loose the wires.
Posted on January 17, 2008
Bert Brown Says:
I just got my copy of Dictate and well it is disapointing ... I have NS9 and vista voice to compare it to ... it is promising but don’t believe anything macspeech tells you .... it has a long way to go to catch up to Naturally Speaking! It is more like a beta version ... it lacked correction, spelling and every other important feature .... even still it is a huge improvment over that iListen crap!
Posted on March 06, 2008
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
Jones Says:
Who is Smith?
“MacSpeech, Inc. is the authority on speech recognition for the Macintosh,” says Smith.
Posted on January 16, 2008