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About Wilma
Mac owner since 1987.
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User Reviews
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The good news: MacSpeech Dictate is VERY usable dictation software for the Mac. It is fast, accurate, easy to use, and takes under 10 minutes to set up and train. Wow! Dictate is light-years better than iListen. If you discarded iListen because it wasn't usable, you should upgrade NOW. The bad news: Dictate is a far-from-complete early release. It doesn't have all its features yet (no spelling mode, no correction feature). Dictate is still buggy. Mixing typing and dictation is a sure way to get Dictate confused and cause some really strange behavior. Especially since Undo is buggy, you will want to do FREQUENT saves. (I usually dictate into Note Pad, with frequent saves, and then transfer text to TextEdit or Bean.) If you haven't used dictation software before, or if you already have a Naturally Speaking on Windows, you may want to hold off buying Dictate until some of the worst bugs get fixed. It takes under 10 minutes to set up Dictate and start dictating text. Accuracy is excellent. There are some capitalization bugs, which result in occasional Words in the middle of sentences getting capitalized. A few times I've seen a random word gets UPPERCASED. Dictate allows you to transcribe speech into its own Note Pad window, or directly into applications. (I mostly use the Bean word processor, as it is fast and simple, and can quickly switch text between smart and dumb quotes.) The Note Pad interface is rather buggy. Typing into it only works if your cursor is at the end; otherwise, letters tend to type backwards, and are directly attached to the previous word. Cutting and pasting cause Dictate to get confused, which will quickly scramble your text. Dictate is very processor-intensive. You will want to turn off process-hogging applications while you work. Teaching Dictate your vocabulary and writing style requires feeding the program TEXT or RTF documents, which it analyzes for vocabulary and word use patterns. Then you get to choose which words actually get added to the program's vocabulary. I'm a professional writer with a huge vocabulary, and fed it a huge amount of text, which took over an hour per profile. (I dictate using two different voices to rest my vocal chords.) Documentation is decent. Summary: Dictate is fast, accurate, and highly usable despite its quirks. If you have used dictation software before, especially iListen, Dictate is well worth getting. If not, you might want to wait one more rev for additional features and bug fixes. |
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iListen is an incredibly useful program. I can type about 70 words per minute (wpm), but can easily speak 500-plus. Even after correcting the words iListen misunderstands, I find dictating with iListen several times faster than typing. User-definable macros can type boilerplate text such as addresses and email signatures. By saying "Jump to [sitename]" I can go to a website faster than finding the site in my browser's pull-down menu. I strongly recommend iListen if you write a lot. If you don't write much, it may not be worth the training time required to get decent accuracy. iListen requires significant training to get word recognition to a high level. While the interface for increasing audio recognition is easy (you read stories aloud), the interface for adding new words to iListen's working vocabulary is poorly designed, difficult to use, buggy, and slow, especially on long documents. The correction interface is slow and buggy. Both interfaces are designed in ways that make user errors virtually inevitable. These are long-standing problems that have not been corrected over several years of version updates. Each iListen user must create an individual profile. Duplicate profiles are useful when one has a cold, or for special projects with vocabulary you won't use otherwise. Unfortunately, iListen's profile management is poor. Once created, the profile name that shows up inside iListen's profile manager can't be changed. A profile can be duplicated by duplicating the profile file in the Finder, renaming it, then double-clicking to load it into iListen. But since new profile replaces the old one, and shows up with the same name, it's impossible to tell from inside the program which version you're using. And while you can share macros between profiles (a very useful feature), you cannot share added vocabulary. This means that each person using a specialty vocabulary has to train the words separately, a big waste of time if you're working with a group. It also turns creating new profiles when versions change from a minor task into a major headache. Program documentation is extensive, but sometimes incomplete or out of date. When I upgraded from iListen 1.6.8 to 1.7, the instructions said to run the installer on the disk image. This proved impossible, because there was no installer! I don't know whether that's been fixed, but it's typical of iListen tech support issues. The company spends a lot of effort providing (fairly good) tech support that would be unnecessary if instructions were up-to-date and basic interface glitches and bugs got fixed. If you already own iListen 1.6.8, I recommend AGAINST upgrading to 1.7 unless you have one of the issues the upgrade fixes. At #39.95, 1.7 doesn't improve 1.6.8's interface, and is likely to require you to create and train a new profile. A friend who has used iListen on and off for years says this has been an ongoing issue: every upgrade requires creating a new profile, which often requires 10 to 30 hours of training time. Summary: If you're willing to dedicate significant effort to getting iListen to work well, it's a HUGE time-saver and will greatly speed your writing. |
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The link posted here downloads the source code. To get a ready-to-run version, download the ZIP version posted here: http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/antirsi/ |
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A fantastic program -- I wish I'd known about SpamSieve years ago! Very easy to set up and train -- within 20 minutes I had set up and trained the program to 97% accuracy, and within two days to 99%.I use it with Eudora 6, and it's seamless, with a super-easy intuitive interface. It's also robust -- I get 100 spams per day; a developer friend filters 3,000 per day in Eudora and Mail. Tip #1: For maximum accuracy, keep the training emails around 65% spam as recommended in the (good) documentation. Tip #2: Sort the folder where SpamSieve puts spams by spam score. Once you have SpamSieve trained, you can ignore everything except the lowest-scoring items. I train SpamSieve with these (so it continues to improve) and trash the rest without looking at them. |
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Summary: Great backup, lousy restore I just tested this software. It does a great job backing up, with lots of options. Backups can be native file format in a Finder folder hierarchy, so you can search them with any search utility. Iterative backups get made within the same folder hierarchy, in dated folders. It's fast. It's smart. Unfortunately, Tri-BACKUP's restore functionality is, AFAICT, extremely limited. You can't simply tell it to restore a folder to how it was at last backup ... or at a given date in the past ... or how it was when some previous backup got made. Nope, you've got to manually page through a file list to decide which version of what gets restored. Since I have over 250,000 files in my Documents folder alone, plus a huge photo archive, restoring using Tri-BACKUP just isn't practical. Too bad, because otherwise it's a nice program, and I've heard very good reports about its reliability. |
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Wow, I thought my files were pretty well-organized until I got THIS program. Now I can find EVERYTHING, quickly and easily! The search function is sophisticated and powerful, the whole program intuitive and easy to use. Documentation is excellent, and support from the developer is fast and responsive. CD Finder made it SO easy to manage my files that I just consolidated 18 years of backups -- nearly a million document files. FileBuddy, another great program, removed duplicates. Now I have 8 data DVDs to search instead of 30. What a great program! Tip: If you are going to do searches that bring up thousands or tens of thousands of files, uncheck "Use Finder icons" in the Appearance section of the Preferences. This prevents long delays while CD Finder gets icons from the files. |
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For those of us who like pull-down text menus rather than icons (or who like aspects of the OS 9 interface), X-Assist provides an easy way to switch and hide applications, go directly to items within System Preferences rather than loading the main window, etc. It's a bit slow, and it doesn't provide a list of windows open under each app as OS 9's application menu could be made to do. However, it does provide convenience, plus a visual cue as to which application is frontmost, something which can be confusing in X. Also recommended: AppleMenu, TypeIt4Me. |
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A fantastic and indespensible program! I use TypeIt4Me all day, every day, in both Classic and OS X. Unlike Spell Catcher (which I use like a dictionary for looking up words), TypeIt4Me shares the SAME shortcuts file for Classic and OS X -- so you can instantly change, add, or delete a shortcut from either interface, and it updates both! TypeIt4Me is fantastic for: + Correcting commonly mispelled words (such as "teh" for "the") + Email signatures and tag lines, phone numbers, addresses, etc. + Shortcutting long or difficult-to-spell words, phrases, and names + Shortcutting common phrases and names that you type a lot It takes only seconds to add, modify, or delete a shortcut, which makes TypeIt4Me very handy for typing a document with a bunch of repetitions of some name or phrase, then deleting the shortcut afterwards. I use this program hundreds to thousands of times per day. It has speeded up my typing, reduced my spelling errors, and made my life a lot easier. |
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An excellent program I have used dozens of times daily since 2003. Although not as customizable as Uninsanity's FruitMenu, I find it easier to use. Configuration works the same way as Classic's menu, which means you can simply copy folder contents to get identical pull-down menus in X and Classic. Hold down the Control key, and you get Apple's standard OS X apple menu. The program is extremely stable, and works just fine with every other app I have tried it with. Five stars! (Tip: I also use X-Assist to give me a pull-down applications menu next to Spotlight.) |
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