MacSpeech Dictate - billed by MacSpeech as the future of speech recognition on the Mac - has been updated, adding several new features and resolving known issues.
MacSpeech Dictate provides an alternative way to interact with your Mac, instead of typing, you can use your voice to input text; rather than clicking your mouse, you speak.
"MacSpeech Dictate 1.3 now lets you use speech recognition with any document you already have," explained Andrew Taylor, founder and CEO of MacSpeech.
"We're also thrilled with how the Help Book system turned out and are proud to provide this helpful resource to our customers."
MacSpeech Dictate 1.3 Release Notes additions include:
"Cache Document" and "Cache Selection" commands
The "Cache Document" command is significantly revamped to be functional in other applications. This command places the entire text from a document into Dictate's cache. Added "Cache Selection", this command places the selected text from a document into Dictate's cache. These commands allow a user to effectively navigate and edit other documents by voice.
Help Book
Searchable, indexed help book for MacSpeech Dictate now available under the Help menu.
Status Item in menu bar / Badging on Dock icon
Microphone status indicators added to Dock icon and menu bar. Appearance of Status item is controlled via Preferences.
"Press The Key" commands
"Press The Key" and "Press The Key Combo" commands will input the keyboard keys specified, including modifiers (Command, Control, Option, Shift) and key names (e.g. "N" or "3").
"Cancel Training" command
Added the command "Cancel Training" to Available Commands window, this will close the Recognition window.
MacSpeech Dictate 1.3 also includes a number of changes and bug fixes including fixing a problem that could cause Dictate to crash when opened.
Phrase Training a word/phrase and replacing it with a longer word/phrase, would sometimes result in a failure of subsequent use of the command "Go to End". This should no longer happen, says the makers.
A list of known issues is also included in the release. For instance, dictation into some third-party applications may still yield some unpredictable results, and this still needs to be resolved.
MacSpeech Dictate requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or Mac OS X 10.5.2 or higher. The MacSpeech Dictate 1.3 update is available free of charge to registered customers using the "Check for Updates" feature.
A full detailed MacSpeech Dictate review can be found here.
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Comments received
Mike said on Wed, 04 Mar 2009
My understanding is that a long-term bug/usability issue in MacSpeech Dictate still remains in the 1.3 release: You are unable to switch between editing your document w/the keyboard and w/voice.
If you attempt to make an edit to your dictated-document via the keyboard, it will confuse the dictation/recognition system, and subsequent voice edit commands will not produce the desired result (basically, they will destroy your document).
This is a huge flaw, doesn't exist in the Windows version of Dragon Naturally Speaking, and is the one thing that is preventing me from purchasing MacSpeech Dictate.
In fairness, it's likely because the OS X Cocoa API doesn't allow MacSpeech to directly read the contents of the text buffer in a given program ... but it's still a show-stopper.
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