With the recent explosion of speech recognition on the iPhone (Dragon Speech, Google, even Bing Map search) some might consider revisiting speech recognition on the Mac desktop platform where the technology can be more effectively utilized. About five years ago, both IBM (ViaVoice) and Dragon (Naturally Speaking) both released Mac versions of their Speech recognition applications but both stopped their programs a few years ago and they are no longer supported.
By far the best speech recognition on the Mac platform today is MacSpeech, which recently upgraded its speech recognition engine to use Nuance’s Dragon (the same engine used in the iPhone app). Their new application is fully able to integrate with Snow Leopard and works out of the box much better than the iPhone application. The accuracy becomes eerily good after spending a few minutes of teaching it to get used to your voice and way of speaking.
As bloggers, we’ve had run-ins with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and other RSI disorders which would have sidelined us for weeks had we not had access to MacSpeech. If you haven’t tried speech recognition in the past few years on the Mac, you might want to give it another try – it is head and shoulders above previous versions.
As MacSpeech affiliates, we can offer MacSpeech applications 25% off of the list price using this link and the coupon code: “9TO5MAC” at checkout. That puts the regular application at $149 (including free headset), which is the lowest price we could find.
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