Speech Technology - June 2008 - (Page 22) DEVELOPMENTS IN DICTATION So he typed and typed and typed some more, so much so that his wrists, hands, and fingers hurt by the end of each workday. Many people in Fletcher’s shoes— especially those who have to use dictation software due to a disability, carpal tunnel syndrome, or just poor typing skills—simply abandoned their beloved Macs for PCs. But not Fletcher. Like so many other Mac users, he is rabid in his adherence to the Mac, often at great personal expense. He has rebuffed countless offers from his company to buy him a PC. “I don’t like PCs. I would sooner buy my own Mac,” he says. That’s why Fletcher is so excited about Dictate, the recent dictation software release from Salem, N.H.-based MacSpeech. Fletcher’s joy aside, MacSpeech Dictate is likely to have far-reaching effects that have many believing it could threaten to break the decades-long stranglehold that PCs have had on the machine dictation market. MacSpeech Dictate is, in essence, the Mac version of the very popular PCbased Dragon NaturallySpeaking program. MacSpeech developed Dictate through a licensing agreement with Nuance. And though Nuance could have entered the market with its own Mac version of NaturallySpeaking, Peter MAC’S ON A ROLL C Mahoney, Nuance’s vice presi“What’s dent and general manager of desktop dictation units, says the so company looked for a partnership exciting instead. “Now we’re at the point where Apple has done very well. We’re seeing a about big growth in that area, and [partnering Dictate is that with MacSpeech] was a way for us to it runs natively on help participate in the market and respond to some of that demand. the Mac.” “We are pleased to help MacSpeech provide a dictation solution, powered by Dragon NaturallySpeaking technology, to users that require a native Macintosh dictation application,” he further said in it was expensive.” Users also a statement. “MacSpeech has intimate faced issues with speed, performance, knowledge of the Macintosh platform training, and compatibility, she says. and deep understanding of Macintosh “What’s so exciting about Dictate is users. This collaboration brings an that it runs natively on the Mac, so you unparalleled opportunity to provide the don’t get those issues,” Springer adds. world’s best dictation technology in a As such, Dictate also allows users to solution that is 100 percent Mac.” operate, navigate, and control their Macs And because it is 100 percent Mac, it and Mac applications with voice comdelivers the same user experience Mac mands. The software can be used to users have come to love. “When people launch applications, open files, cut, paste, think of the Mac, they think of it as copy, print, scroll through files, compose more user-friendly than Windows,” says email, format documents, and surf the Robin Springer, president of Computer Web. An “Available Commands” winTalk, a consulting firm specializing in the dow can be accessed on-screen through a implementation of dictation and other drop-down menu. The software even rechands-free technologies. “People have ognizes spoken commands separately been trying to get Windows dictation from dictation, freeing the user from havprograms to run on a Mac for years, but ing to tell the software to change modes. because they weren’t native [to the Mac], A Checkered Past Previous attempts at desktop dictation software for the Mac were fraught with problems. The landscape has been dotted halk it up to a halo effect from Apple’s success with its iPod and iPhone, great with near misses and failures that started marketing, the ubiquity of its TV commercials, or a general sense of disappointin the early 1990s with Dragon Systems’ ment with Microsoft’s Windows Vista PC operating system, but sales of Mac computers PowerSecretary, a software product that have been exploding since late last year. Apple moved 2.3 million Macs in the last was slow and required users to pause three months of 2007, raising its share of the total global computer market to 6.1 between each word spoken. PowerSecrepercent, according to research from Gartner. In the first quarter of this year, it sold tary simply disappeared after only a few another 2.9 million units. With sales like that, some industry watchdogs expect that years on the market. Apple’s share of the computer market will rise to 21 percent in the U.S. and 10 Then came ViaVoice, which IBM percent globally by the end of the year. launched in the latter part of the decade. The Mac resurgence—after several years of just barely holding on to a paltry 2 Versions of ViaVoice were available for percent to 3 percent of the total computer market—has prompted many to anticipate the Mac and PC, but the software was a software revolution as more Mac sales lead to more software for the Mac, which slow and clunky. It also required users to will lead to more Mac sales, which will lead to even more software, and so on. dictate into its built-in SpeakPad speechAs the first sign of that, Loquendo TTS, for example, is now available for enabled word processor and then transfer developers of multimedia applications on the Mac OS X operating system (versions the transcribed text to a destination folder. In 2003, IBM gave the exclusive 10.4 and later). —L.K. rights for ViaVoice to ScanSoft, which in 22 | Speech Technology JUNE 2008 www.speechtechmag.com http://www.speechtechmag.com
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