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(Redirected from Macspeech)
Industry | Speech recognition and voice dictation software |
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Successor | Nuance Communications, Inc. |
Founded | March 7, 1997 |
Headquarters | |
Products |
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Website | www.nuance.com |
MacSpeech, Inc. was a New Hampshire-based technology company that produced software-based speech recognition and voice dictation solutions for the Apple ecosystem. The company's products included iListen, MacSpeech Dictate, MacSpeech Dictate Medical, MacSpeech Dictate Legal, MacSpeech Dictate International, and MacSpeech Scribe. On February 12, 2010, Nuance Communications, Inc. acquired MacSpeech.[1]
History[edit]
Support for OS X El Capitan (10.11) Availability Dragon for Mac Medical is currently available for digital download for a limited-time promotional price of $999.99 from the Nuance online store in the United States and will be available through Nuance’s partners and online stores in other English-speaking countries.
The first commercial voice dictation product for Mac OS X was IBM's ViaVoice, but ScanSoft, the company that had exclusive global distribution rights to ViaVoice, merged with Nuance and stopped developing ViaVoice for Macintosh. (The first dictation software for Mac OS 9 was Articulate System's PowerSecretary.)[2] Seeing a continued need for a Mac-based speech-to-text solution, MacSpeech was founded in 1996 by Andrew Taylor, a former employee of Articulate Systems[3] experienced with software-based speech recognition technologies.
MacSpeech iListen MacSpeech's wildly popular speech recognition software product first released in 2000.
iListen[edit]
MacSpeech's first product, iListen, was developed in partnership with Philips Speech Processing using its 'FreeSpeech 2000' speech engine. First released in 2000, by 2006 iListen was the only third-party software product that allowed voice-to-text input on the newer MacIntosh models requiring OSX. Its competitors at the time were Apple's own speech recognition software (built into Mac OS X); Dragon Naturally Speaking for PC by Nuance, running under a Windowsvirtualization software solution such as Parallels Desktop for Mac or VMware Fusion; and the discontinued program ViaVoice by Nuance/IBM.
MacSpeech Dictate replaced iListen in 2008
MacSpeech Dictate[edit]
In January 2008, iListen was discontinued, and replaced by 'MacSpeech Dictate' (released February 15, 2008). The firm abandoned the Philips speech engine in favor of the speech-recognition engine Nuance used in its Dragon NaturallySpeaking product for PC. MacSpeech Dictate was a winner of the MacWorld 2008 Best of Show award.[4] In 2009, the firm released several editions of its products for the MacIntosh, including MacSpeech Dictate Medical, MacSpeech Dictate Legal and MacSpeech Dictate International.
MacSpeech Scribe
MacSpeech Scribe[edit]
MacSpeech Scribe is speech recognition software for Mac OS X designed specifically for transcription of recorded voice dictation. It runs on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The software transcribes dictation recorded by an individual speaker. Typically the speaker will have recorded their dictation using a digital recording device such as a handheld digital recorder, mobile smartphone (e.g. iPhone), or desktop or laptop computer with a suitable microphone. The program supports the audio file formats aif, .aiff, .wav, .mp4, .m4a, and .m4v.
Acquisition by Nuance[edit]
On February 12, 2010, MacSpeech, Inc. was acquired by Nuance Communications, Inc., and MacSpeech's products were incorporated into Nuance's Dragon NaturalSpeaking product line.[1]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ ab'Nuance Acquires MacSpeech, Extending Dragon NaturallySpeaking Family to the Mac'. Retrieved 2017-02-04.
- ^'TidBITS Apple Ups the AMTE'. tidbits.com. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
- ^'MacSpeech - MacSpeech People'. 2008-11-13. Archived from the original on 2008-11-13. Retrieved 2017-02-04.
- ^'Macworld Expo Best of Show award winners'. macworld.com. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MacSpeech&oldid=917797013'
In October 2018, Nuance announced that it has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac and will support it for only 90 days from activation in the US or 180 days in the rest of the world. The continuous speech-to-text software was widely considered to be the gold standard for speech recognition, and Nuance continues to develop and sell the Windows versions of Dragon Home, Dragon Professional Individual, and various profession-specific solutions.
Nuance For Mac Os X
This move is a blow to professional users—such as doctors, lawyers, and law enforcement—who depended on Dragon for dictating to their Macs, but the community most significantly affected are those who can control their Macs only with their voices.
What about Apple’s built-in accessibility solutions? macOS does support voice dictation, although my experience is that it’s not even as good as dictation in iOS, much less Dragon Professional Individual. Some level of voice control of the Mac is also available via Dictation Commands, but again, it’s not as powerful as what was available from Dragon Professional Individual.
TidBITS reader Todd Scheresky is a software engineer who relies on Dragon Professional Individual for his work because he’s a quadriplegic and has no use of his arms. He has suggested several ways that Apple needs to improve macOS speech recognition to make it a viable alternative to Dragon Professional Individual:
- Support for user-added custom words: Every profession has its own terminology and jargon, which is part of why there are legal, medical, and law enforcement versions of Dragon for Windows. Scheresky isn’t asking Apple to provide such custom vocabularies, but he needs to be able to add custom words to the vocabulary to carry out his work.
- Support for speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition: Currently, macOS’s speech recognition is speaker-independent, which means that it works pretty well for everyone. But Scheresky believes it needs to become speaker-dependent, so it can learn from your corrections to improve recognition accuracy. Also, Apple’s speech recognition isn’t continuous—it works for only a few minutes before stopping and needing to be reinvoked.
- Support for cursor positioning and mouse button events: Although Scheresky acknowledges that macOS’s Dictation Commands are pretty good and provide decent support for text cursor positioning, macOS has nothing like Nuance’s MouseGrid, which divides the screen into a 3-by-3 grid and enables the user to zoom in to a grid coordinate, then displaying another 3-by-3 grid to continue zooming. Nor does Apple have anything like Nuance’s mouse commands for moving and clicking the mouse pointer.
When Scheresky complained to Apple’s accessibility team about macOS’s limitations, they suggested the Switch Control feature, which enables users to move the pointer (along with other actions) by clicking a switch. He talks about this in a video.
Unfortunately, although Switch Control would let Scheresky control a Mac using a sip-and-puff switch or a head switch, such solutions would be both far slower than voice and a literal pain in the neck. There are some better alternatives for mouse pointer positioning:
- Dedicated software, in the form of a $35 app called iTracker.
- An off-the-shelf hack using Keyboard Maestro and Automator.
- An expensive head-mounted pointing device, although the SmartNav is $600 and the HeadMouse Nano and TrackerPro are both about $1000. It’s also not clear how well they interface with current versions of macOS.
Regardless, if Apple enhanced macOS’s voice recognition in the ways Scheresky suggests, it would become significantly more useful and would give users with physical limitations significantly more control over their Macs… and their lives. If you’d like to help, Scheresky suggests submitting feature request feedback to Apple with text along the following lines (feel free to copy and paste it):
Because Nuance has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, it is becoming difficult for disabled users to use the Mac. Please enhance macOS speech recognition to support user-added custom words, speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition that learns from user corrections to improve accuracy, and cursor positioning and mouse button events.
Thank you for your consideration!
Thanks for encouraging Apple to bring macOS’s accessibility features up to the level necessary to provide an alternative to Dragon Professional Individual for Mac. Such improvements will help both those who face physical challenges to using the Mac and those for whom dictation is a professional necessity.