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EDITOR NOTES
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DESCRIPTION
MacSpeech Dictate - Better Accuracy, Stronger Recognition, Faster Performance.
Welcome to MacSpeech Dictate, the premier speech recognition solution for the Macintosh. Forget about typing; with MacSpeech Dictate you're free to focus on what you have to say. MacSpeech Dictate's accuracy and capabilities make it as fun, productive, and intuitive to use as the Mac itself.
The all-new MacSpeech Dictate provides:
Amazing Accuracy
Right out of the box, MacSpeech Dictate will astonish you with its accuracy. You simply talk and leave the recognition to MacSpeech Dictate.
Minimal Training Required
MacSpeech Dictate provides astounding accuracy and productivity. With just minutes of training, you'll be using MacSpeech Dictate's superior capabilities.
Essential Command Capabilities
Instead of using your mouse to select menu commands or your keyboard to type shortcuts, just speak a command. MacSpeech Dictate executes it for you. What's more, MacSpeech Dictate understands key commands. With the "Press The Key" and "Press The Key Combo" commands, you can enter specific keys and even keyboard modifiers like Command, Option, Shift, and Control. That makes you more productive and MacSpeech Dictate more intuitive. What could be better?
Built Especially For The Mac
Mac users expect only the best from the applications they use on their Macs. MacSpeech Dictate was built from the ground up to ensure the ultimate experience on Mac OS X.
Works With The Apps You Already Have
Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and more. And MacSpeech Dictate works great with Apple's applications as well, including iChat, Mail, iPhoto, and Keynote, among others.
Spelling A World Of Words
MacSpeech Dictate's spelling mode lets you easily spell words, names, and acronyms with either natural language or the International Radio Alphabet. You have complete control over every aspect of your speech recognition input.
Make Your Move
You don't need a keyboard or mouse to move around in your documents. MacSpeech Dictate lets you move your cursor forwards, backwards, and much more with just your voice. It helps make editing your documents a breeze.
Even Greater Recognition
MacSpeech Dictate boasts robust Phrase Training capabilities allowing it to learn as it goes based on your voice input. That means even greater accuracy that more fully integrates into your Macintosh experience.
Document Freedom
MacSpeech Dictate works great with most text documents, even those it didn't create. MacSpeech Dictate can read a document's contents, or a portion of it, that you can then navigate and edit.
Exceptional Online Help
For those times when you need a little assistance, MacSpeech Dictate boasts a complete online, searchable help book. It's convenient to use, easy to understand, and all just a mouse click away.
No Hidden Costs
MacSpeech Dictate includes everything you need to be instantly productive as soon as you start using it, including a high quality headset microphone.
Instructional Videos
The MacSpeech Dictate instructional videos are designed to provide you with easy-to-understand, practical tips and techniques for getting the most from MacSpeech Dictate. Check them out.
WHAT'S NEW
Version 1.5.7:
- Fixed crashes related to processes that did not correctly report themselves via the Accessibility API, these crashes occurred must commonly during caching activities.
REQUIREMENTS
- Mac OS X 10.5.6 or later.
- Internet connection required for product registration.
- MacSpeech-certified noise-cancelling microphone (included with new purchase).
| SCREENSHOT
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| MacSpeech Dictate User Reviews (22 posts) | Write A Review |
 | Nov 18 2009 |
MONTY LEE I've been using 1.3 for a while and it has worked very well on a Macbook (circa 2007). I finally upgraded to 1.5 and have had nothing but problems. The program continually crashes or just quits working. I've tried my old Macbook, and even my MacPro (2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Xeon with 14 GB RAM). Last weekend I finally upgraded to Snow Leopard by installing a NEW hard drive and doing a fresh install of SL and letting Apple migrate needed files. I then installed Dictate and have the same problems. So it isn't my computer or OS (10.6.2). I've been trying to contact both Sales and Tech Support now for a month and no one replies. I even sent a tweet but still no response. There is NO SUPPORT. Even Sales doesn't care. I wouldn't buy from this company ever again, and cannot recommend Dictate 1.5.
(Version 1.5.7) | |
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 | Nov 14 2009 |
DANNOTDAN The Amazon.com price linked above is wrong, they are charging $166.99.
(Version 1.5.6) | |
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| Oct 7 2009 |
BETO BOTON I was one of MacSpeech customers who "upgraded" from iListen to Dictate. I continue to use iListen since Dictate is not a mature product. Unfortunately the only concern MacSpeech peole have with the product is to charge more and more from customers, providing meaningless and insignificant updates. The fault is not in using Dragon's engine at all. It's implementation for OS X is limited, demanding on resources, and not user friendly. Sorry guys, do not what you want, but what your customers need! Current evaluation: Poor & Greedy.
(Version 1.5.5) | |
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| Oct 6 2009 |
MMUECK Yea, I paid $200 a while back for this and it was just awful - no easy corrections or dictionary expansion capability. It was a buggy, sloppy port of DNS to the Mac. Then they fixed some of those bugs and had the hide to charge some outrageous upgrade price shortly afterwards that truly bent the majority of their user base out of shape. At the very least they should include a big "L" sticker and a tube of lubricant in every box. To the makers of Dictate: How do you take a quality product like DNS, that Mac users have been craving for years, and turn that golden opportunity into something that consistently seems to draw the anger of your users. Way to go...
(Version 1.5.5) | |
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| Oct 4 2009 |
RRNOWELL Since virtually everyone acknowledges that the Dragon engine is the best and MacSpeech has licensed it and since Dragon Dictate is acknowledged to be the premier product, has anyone tried using Dragon Dictate running under WinXP and Parallels or VM Fusion? Perhaps it would be better to take this route as the owners of MacSpeech seem to be bilking out of cash customers with an inferior product. I sure wish Apple would spin off a subsidiary to compete with MacSpeech and clear out the dross as this hurts Apple's product by limiting the application software available on the Mac and having a poor vendor that is leaving a bad taste in the mouths of Apple's customers.
(Version 1.5.2) | |
| [ 1 Reply - Reply ] | |
Replies:
| Oct 29 2009 |
GIORGIOM I am using Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 on a Parallels VM running Windows 7 on a macbook. I did have to buy a USB microphone, which was kind of annoying, but it works perfectly well. Windows 7 in general works like a charm, including the beta of Office 2010. I'm very happy with the overall experience.
(Version 1.5.5) | |
| Sep 28 2009 |
MONDELE Unfortunately, the dictation software market on the Mac seems to have been dominated by exploitative people who see Mac users as an undiscriminating group of rich people, willing and ready to pay exorbitant prices for inferior products. Dragon Naturally Speaking was originally developed on and for the Mac, when the first PowerPCs were coming out. (It also worked with the dedicated sound processors in the AV Macs). I was present at a sales presentation oriented towards Mac VARs, and was extremely interested in adding the product to our lineup. Upon inquiry, we were told that it would be sold for $1500/seat, that we were prohibited from selling it for less, as this would hurt the branding the company was pursuing. Shortly thereafter, the Mac product was discontinued and it was offered on the PC for $100/seat. Now I'm getting offers to by the Windows version of the software for $30 (discounted from a normal price of $100) - or I can by this Mac-licensed version for $200. I'm sorry, Dragon, I use a Mac because of a superior value for my money, not the other way around. I, too, would welcome competition in this area.
(Version 1.5.2) | |
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| Jun 18 2009 |
HMURCHISON I used to do training on Dragon NaturallySpeaking (primarily the Medical version which often floored Doctors) and the Professional version. I'm itching to get back to dictating. With a good microphone and properly enuciated speech it's easy to hit %80 + accuracy right out the box and % 90 if you're experienienced in how dictation engines like vocal cadence. It's great that we have the DNS engine now powering the software so where we need to see rapid evolution is in the supporting cast. I noticed that Dictate is Intel only so I'd expect that it would be wise to move the software to Snow Leopard since the developer has no PPC users. I've always felt that dictation software could really benefit from judicious use of threading for performance and I hope MacSpeech is looking to leverage Grand Central Dispatch to good effect as well as 64-bit. Also further leveraging Applescript, Automator and the newly improved services would increase the power of Dictate immensely IMO. Most people think that these programs are strictly about voice to text but the real power is in tying automated procedures to vocal commands. If you're a developer and you get this down you will have customers for life.
(Version 1.5.1) | |
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| Jun 16 2009 |
BIGCLOITS Dictate is one of the most unstable and generally poorly designed major pieces of software I have ever had the misfortune to be stuck using. Far from being a major improvement over MacSpeech's previous product, iListen, Dictate still feels as twitchy and poorly thought out as iListen ever did, even after a year and a half of development and at least two major updates. The only real improvement is that Dictate is based on a far superior speech recognition engine (and that's not nothing). However, it's a lot less use if the software wrapped around the engine totally sucks. I purchased Dictate shortly after its release in early 2008, and have barely had a day of trouble-free use of the product ever since. Routine hanging and crashing has been the main problem. Due to an egregious Canadian localization bug, for several months I had to choose between a version of Dictate that would literally not launch all, and an older version that merely crashed frequently. When 1.5 was release recently (May 09), I hoped I would finally be able to use Dictate with fewer hassles, but no such luck. Even running on a well-maintained year-old MacBook Pro, Dictate 1.5 (and 1.5.1) is as crashy as ever. Within minutes of using the new version, CPU usage spikes to 98% and stayed there -â not just bringing Dictate to a halt, but the entire machine, and even refusing to force quit. Lovely. Such experiences have been the rule with Dictate from the beginning! For many months I communicated regularly with MacSpeech about my frustrations with their product. I cooperated diligently with a great deal of troubleshooting. I was often treated like I was some kind of problem customer, despite the fact that I have some empathy for the kind of frustrations tech support workers have to cope with and try pretty hard to be nice to them. Some weren't so bad, of course. But despite the professionalism of some individual tech support professionals at MacSpeech, the overall customer service experience was abominable. Ultimately, MacSpeech simply was not willing to stand behind their product in any substantive way. I am a deeply annoyed customer.
(Version 1.5.1) | |
| [ 1 Reply - Reply ] | |
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| Jun 30 2009 |
SIGIL Sadly, I must agree with BigCloits' review of Macspeech Dictate. It has not even come close to living up to my expectation or the hype it received before it was released. With each upgrade I became less and less hopeful that they would fix the bugs and accuracy issues. Then I get an email with nearly as much hype as the prerelease hype. I became somewhat hopeful. Then I read that I would be charged $50.00, which is a "special" rate for suckers....I mean previous owners. I find it very upsetting that they would charge an upgrade fee for 1.5. This is compounded by the fact that 1.5 seemed to have some serious issues from what I've read online. In the end, I've decided not to to invest anymore money in this product. I have no issues with an upgrade fee for a product, but the product before the upgrade should be useable and somewhat live up to my expectations.
(Version 1.5.2) | |
| Jun 9 2009 |
LAW12 Question...I see everyone is upset a the shipping prices. With that aside. Anyone that has purchased this program since Jan '09. Is it a viable program for dictation into Word?
(Version 1.5.1) | |
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| May 28 2009 |
SLOB That's what I like about macUpdate. I really want a program like this, got disappointed with IBM ViaVoice years ago and waited - and having been tipped off by these comments will keep waiting for some other developer to put out a fair deal, including the upgrades. I do appreciate software development and have spent quite a bit over the years, but these especially larger outfits so blatantly creaming the buyers I've had more than enough of. Thanks guys, and thanks to the honest working developers out there too.
(Version 1.5.1) | |
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| May 28 2009 |
MISHA Good points, but unfortunately in the speech recognition space I don't think we're going to see any compelling or superior offerings any time soon. MacSpeech is (I believe, last I checked) already licensing what is considered the best recognition technology.
(Version 1.5.1) | |
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