Speech Technology - June 2008 - (Page 23) DEVELOPMENTS IN DICTATION Companies to Call Sponsored Content 2005 merged with Nuance. By that time, Nuance had already acquired Dragon Systems, makers of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Though it still offers the IBM ViaVoice for Mac product, Nuance has put very little behind it, citing a lack of demand. The only dictation product to show any real success in the Mac world was iListen, MacSpeech’s precursor to its new Dictate product. iListen used underlying speech recognition technology from Phillips, but the software was getting old and difficult to support, according to MacSpeech president and CEO Andrew Taylor. “iListen’s code base was written in 1998, and it was starting to get quite a bit of crust around the edges,” he says. iListen was also very limited in its capabilities. For starters, users often had to spend 15 minutes or more training it to recognize their voices. It was also slow and memory-intensive and lacked many of the more advanced features of other competitive products. For a while, Fletcher was using iListen to convert his taped interviews and story notes into text files, but eventually gave up using the program. In addition to the hours it took to enter the text into iListen, he spent hours more in iListen correcting all of the mistakes the software made. “In my business, deadlines are the most important thing, and something that slows me down has to go,” he says. Expanded Access MacSpeech Dictate is also expanding Mac’s accessibility options for the disabled, something that had also been very limited. Alva Access Group, for example, had provided a Mac version of its OutSpoken screen-reading product for several years, but stopped making the product when Mac’s OS X came out. In its place, Apple developed its own screen reader, called VoiceOver, which comes built into OS X. VoiceOver enables users to navigate their computers, create and edit text documents, send and receive email, browse the Web, and even play chess. It comes with 20 voice options. Springer also expects Dictate will expand Mac’s user base among the disabled. “A lot of people who dictate to their computers out of necessity left Macs for PCs. It will be interesting to see how many go back,” she says. Taylor says the process has already begun. “We’re already starting to see people come back to Macs. They’re looking at [Dictate] with the same recognition engine from Nuance; they know [Dragon NaturallySpeaking] works, and now they’re ready to come back,” he explains. “Mac users use Macs because they like the applications environment and the way it works. If they had any real interest in Windows, they would have bought a PC for a lot less money.” But not every Mac user will be able to use Dictate. The MacSpeech software requires the latest versions of Mac hardware and software, and only runs with Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher and the latest Mac computers with Intel processors. “You can only run this new software on the newest machines,” Taylor says. “We jettisoned the old software that had been around for years to take advantage of only things that are brand new.” Not for Everyone But while the Mac’s popularity is gaining (see the sidebar on page 22), not everyone is joining the craze. Eric Rose, electronic health records product manager at McKesson Provider Technologies, simply says that the Mac “is not part of our development plans.” Among the clients for his company’s medical dictation and transcription products, “there is no demand for [Mac software],” he says. “PCs are cheaper, more widely available, and the IT expertise is more easily available for the Windows environment.” To make the company’s electronic health records software available for the Mac “would take up valuable R&D resources, and we just don’t see a compelling reason to do that,” he adds. Still, most other dictation technology vendors have taken a wait-and-see approach to the Mac. Apptec, maker of the DigiTel and DigiScribe dictation and transcription technologies, hasn’t tested its products Now you can eliminate all background noise and dictate quietly and privately with all speech recognition (SR) software. One of the biggest problems with SR accuracy is ambient sound but with TalkTech’s unique microphone circuit, the SmartMic™ (patents pending), coupled with our patented voice silencer mask, you can now tune the microphone circuit to your unique voice to obtain maximum SR accuracy, and do it silently! The response to this new product has been exceptional. It is now being used throughout the U.S. and numerous foreign countries by physicians, court reporters, business people, captioners, researchers, persons with disabilities, students and others. Nuance Communications (Dragon Naturally Speaking) recently certified the SmartMic as the best handheld microphone available for use with its software! Talk Technologies Inc. Phone: 1 888 811 9944 Email: info@talktech.com Web: www.TalkTech.com www.speechtechmag.com http://www.TalkTech.com http://www.TalkTech.com http://www.speechtechmag.com
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