{"id":275,"date":"2008-11-02T16:22:10","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T00:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/?p=275"},"modified":"2008-11-02T16:22:10","modified_gmt":"2008-11-03T00:22:10","slug":"macspeech-dictate-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/02\/macspeech-dictate-review\/","title":{"rendered":"MacSpeech Dictate (Review)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We just installed a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.macspeech.com\/dictate\/\">MacSpeech Dictate<\/a> on the iMac. I&#8217;m using it right now to type this review. I have to say, having used it just a bit, it is an awesome program.<\/p>\n<p>When I first installed the software, I had to train it by reading a few sentences. That only took perhaps five minutes. Then I was ready to go. I goofed around for a few moments, trying to think of sentences to throw at it. I was curious how well it understood church jargon, so I made up a few sentences about the Trinitarian controversy and about Tertullian. It was funny that the speech software knew how to spell Tertullian, which the Mac&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/developer.apple.com\/documentation\/Cocoa\/Conceptual\/SpellCheck\/Concepts\/SpellChecker.html#\/\/apple_ref\/doc\/uid\/20000720-BBCFDGFC\">spellcheck service<\/a> underlined in red.<\/p>\n<p>I was trying to think of a real world test. Here&#8217;s what I decided to do.<\/p>\n<p>I recently finished a book called <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Visioneering-Blueprint-Developing-Maintaining-Personal\/dp\/157673787X\">Visioneering<\/a><\/em>, by Andy Stanley. Whenever I read a book, I underline things that catch my interest as I go along. That way, the next time I read the book, the highlights will jump out at me. What occurred to me was that I could read those highlights into the computer and then I would be able to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Grep\">grep<\/a> on them.<\/p>\n<p>So I did it. I flipped through the whole book, reading everything I&#8217;d underlined. There were 97 quotes totaling 1808 words. Reading them in took me about 30 minutes. (Mind you, I&#8217;d never used this software before, nor any other voice recognition software.)<\/p>\n<p>But the truly amazing thing is that one of my children was in the next room playing &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/starwars.lego.com\/en-us\/videogame\/default.aspx\">Lego Star Wars<\/a>&#8221; the whole time, with the volume turned up to 11.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe the reason I&#8217;ve had such good luck is because of my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ptsem.edu\/\">Princeton<\/a> trained voice. After all, I&#8217;m a preacher: I use my voice every Sunday. Maybe that&#8217;s why the software was able to understand me so well. But considering the technical vocabulary I was using and the noisy environment, I&#8217;m still impressed with how good this software is. I look forward to getting a copy to use at work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We just installed a MacSpeech Dictate on the iMac. I&#8217;m using it right now to type this review. I have to say, having used it just a bit, it is an awesome program. When I first installed the software, I had to train it by reading a few sentences. That only took perhaps five minutes. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRqpr-4r","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}