Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
MacSpeech Inc, the creators of MacSpeech Dictate voice recognition software for Mac powered by the Dragon speech recognition engine, today announced out of their headquarters in the US a new product in the MacSpeech Dictate range: MacSpeech Dictate International. The International version will ship with voice support for four languages, English (UK and US), French, Italian and German.
The surprise exclusion from the three new supported European languages (French, Italian and German) was Spanish, especially as the customer base for Spanish speakers would be huge. In their press release MacSpeech 
have acknowledged Spanish speakers, Andrew Taylor head of MacSpeech said “ .. we did not forget those who speak Spanish; when there is applicable news, rest assured we will announce it.” so read into that what you will, coming in the near future I would guess.
MacSpeech Dictate International is available now for purchase in the US and it is expected into Australia in a couple of weeks. It will be available as a stand alone package or for people who already own MacSpeech Dictate v1.5+ a cross grade licence will be available. For Australian English speakers you should still be looking at the standard MacSpeech Dictate v1.5+ version currently available as International will not support Australian English.
Click here for the full MacSpeech International press release.
Posted in Digital Dictation & Transcription, MacSpeech Dictate International, Software, Voice Recognition Software | No Comments »
Monday, September 14th, 2009
Released mid 2009 in Australia in a joint venture between Philips Dictation and Nuance was the Philips Dragon NaturallySpeaking Voice Recorder Edition (LFH0660/10) at an incredibly cheap price of RRP AU$259.00 incl. GST. At that price it certainly makes you sit up and pay attention, after all the package contains Dragon NaturallySpeaking v10 and a very competent Philips Digital VoiceTracer 660.
Not much to say about the Philips DVT 660, a great little recorder, perfect for single speaker audio. The 660 records in MP3 format and like all recorders has multiple recording modes (tip: always use the highest quality recording mode, SHQ on the DVT 660). This is a note taker not a dictaphone so you are not able to rewind/review your audio just simply record and stop, although you can pause during recordings. The recorder has 1Gb of in-built flash memory, can be powered by two AAA batteries or by USB and can record on the highest quality audio setting for 17.5 hours. (more…)
Posted in Digital Dictation & Transcription, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Philips, Software, Voice Recognition Software | No Comments »
Friday, May 15th, 2009
So there I was, on my early morning commute down to Sydney on the train, checking my email in between games of FlightControl when BAM! this graphic jumped out at me from an email:
MacSpeech Dictate Upgrade to Version 1.5 Announced
Being a reseller for MacSpeech Dictate since its release back in February 2008 I thought I might have, you know, been told it was coming. So as a reseller and user of MacSpeech Dictate I was just a little surprised. MacSpeech Dictate is the worlds leading voice recognition software for Mac OS X. Launched at MacWorld in 2008 it won Best In Show that year.
(more…)
Posted in MacSpeech Dictate, Voice Recognition Software | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
Users of Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10 Standard, Preferred, Professional and Legal editions should upgrade their software to the new Service Pack 1 recently announced by Nuance. The SP1 includes the usual bug fixes along with a whole host of new features and improvements.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking Service Pack 1
Download the service pack here.
Here is the detail from their SP1 release notes:
Issues resolved in Service Pack 1:
New Features:
* New options are now available for enabling/disabling the following quick formatting commands:
o Delete/Cut [XYZ]
o Copy [XYZ]
* New formatting option “Caps Lock key overrides No Caps/All Caps/Cap commands”. When this option is enabled, text case will be formatted based on the keyboard Caps Lock key.
* When starting Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 in Tray Icon Only mode, a balloon pop-up will appear above the microphone alerting the user that the DragonBar is hidden.
* When prompted for the Windows Username and Password to schedule Accuracy Tuning or Data Collection, it is now possible to turn off Accuracy Tuning or Data Collection by selecting “Do not display again” on the “Windows Username and Password” dialog.
* If the microphone was on or asleep when starting audio file transcription, the microphone will be in sleep mode when transcription finishes.
Accuracy Tuning and Scheduler:
* Scheduled tasks for Accuracy Tuning or Data Collection cannot be run when Dragon is running. The Accuracy Center no longer states the task completed successfully if it could not be started.
* The message “You need to increase the size of the acoustic archives” is no longer displayed when saving a user profile that does not have a full acoustic archive.
* When upgrading user profiles from a previous version that contain large amounts of training data, some training data may not be used, resulting in decreased accuracy in version 10. Upgrading the user profile after installing Service Pack 1 will use all training data available.
* Improved correction handling so actual corrections will not be discarded. The result is faster improvements to dictation accuracy when making corrections.
* Automatic adaptation of user profiles created without training will no longer appear when transcribing a sound file.
Application Support:
* Improved interaction with HTML based windows when running as a Windows Restricted User. This includes Internet Explorer as well editing/creating HTML messages in Microsoft Outlook.
* The “Page Down” command now functions properly in Microsoft Outlook 2007.
Commands:
* When using Mozilla Firefox with the “Require click to select HTML hyperlinks” option turned on, it is now possible to say the “(number)” as well as the original “Choose (number)” command to select a specific link.
* It is now possible to create commands that use abbreviations and expanded form without causing recognition as text (i.e. Mr. or Mister, Dr. or Doctor).
* “Clear delimiting characters” command properly removes fields entered into a table in Microsoft Word.
* In the Spanish version, the commands “ditar selección” and “ditar todos” have been fixed. They are now “editar selección” and “editar todos”.
* In the German version, using the command “verbinde das” to compound two words will no longer remove the capitalization.
Correction:
* Improved correction suggestions based on the context of the word or phrase being selected.
* Correction menu and spell dialog now include non-formatted suggestions.
* Extra spacing is no longer left after cutting or deleting a word or phrase.
* Corrections will no longer be marked with a green asterisk in the vocabulary editor.
Dictation:
* When dictating large amounts of text into an application a message will appear stating that “Dragon has reached the maximum amount of speech data that can be saved.” This message will no longer appear multiple times per application session.
* When dictating in Spell Mode, spaces are no longer entered.
* Dictating any punctuation in the middle of a line of text will no longer delete existing text before or after the insertion point.
Automatic Text Formatting:
* When dictating a custom phrase at the beginning of a paragraph, the entire phrase will no longer be capitalized.
* Improved number formatting.
* Word Properties will now preserve the number of spaces specified in the written form or alternate written form.
* Dictating a comma into existing text will no longer insert a space.
* Improved formatting of the word degree(s).
* Improved formatting of “Mister” and “Doctor”, including the appropriate abbreviations.
* Improved formatting of dates when “dates as spoken” option is selected.
* When dictating times in the Spanish version, “las/la” will no longer be removed during formatting.
* When dictating a number after a comma in the German or Dutch versions, the comma will no longer be shifted to the right, connecting to the number.
* Improved handling of Dutch Zip Codes in the Dutch version.
* Using a colon in the Dutch version no longer inserts a space before or capitalizes the word after.
Miscellaneous:
* It is now possible to change word properties for words with special properties.
* The product’s serial number is now displayed in the Help > About Dragon…
* A warning message will now be displayed indicating that dictation in EMR applications is not supported in non-Medical editions.
* Improved handling of Results box tracking and anchoring.
* Improved handling of speech data when changing dictated words using the keyboard.
* It is now possible to upgrade version 9 user profile with an Austrian Legal Vocabulary to version 10.
Data Distribution Tool (nsadmin):
* Customized word properties are no longer lost when distributing vocabularies using the Data Distribution tool.
* Distributing commands that use list variables to systems that already have the same command, will now overwrite the existing command. A duplicate command will not be created.
* It is not possible to distribute a version 10.0 vocabulary using the Data Distribution Tool after installing Service Pack 1. An error that the vocabulary is corrupted will be displayed. The vocabulary must be exported from a Service Pack 1 installation before distributing.
Posted in Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Voice Recognition Software | No Comments »
