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| MacSpeech Dictate | 
 enlarge | From: MacSpeech, Inc.
Category: Software
List Price: $199.99
Buy New: $161.99
You Save: $38.00 (19%)
New (13) Used (4) from $149.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  80 reviews
Sales Rank: 66
Format: Cd-rom
Platform: Mac Os X Intel
Media: CD-ROM
Edition: Standard
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 6 x 2.8
MPN: MSDICTATE
Model: MACSPEECH DICTATE
UPC: 806709380876
EAN: 0806709380876
Release Date: February 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 76-80 of 80 | | « PREV 1 ... | | |
 Not Ready For Prime Time March 28, 2008
15 out of 20 found this review helpful
I agree with other posters here. As a long time user of Dragon Naturally Speaking, I was thrilled when a voice dictation product using the Dragon engine became available for the Mac. I received my disks 3 weeks ago and installation was fine. unfortunately, the program crashed repeatedly when trying to create a profile. Calls and emails to MacSpeech resulted in no solutions. Today, I found several forums with numerous angry customers with the same crashing problem and frustration with lack of support from MacSpeech. It turns out that there is a bad batch of DVD data disks. Instead of publicly acknowledging the problem and offering a disk replacment/download, the MacSpeech support site has been down for at least 2 weeks.
I can't comment on how the program otherwise functions, as I can't get past the profile creation step. i understand from other posters that the copy/paste and word correction functions are clunky and/or non-existent
My advice: don't buy Dictate until it is much more mature! It is clearly a beta product at present.
My particular report of disaster March 25, 2008
15 out of 21 found this review helpful
After reading all the great press, I ran out and bought Macspeech Dictate...installed it on my 2Ghz iMac, and then tried to run it...again, and again, and again. Without any luck! So I went to their website, hoping that there would be some troubleshooting concepts...but NOOOO. Just a buried mention of a disc production problem. A quick Search Engine check under "MacSpeech Dictate install problems" revealed several sites that echoed my experience. MY SUGGESTION: WAIT UNTIL VERSION 1.1 OR 1.2 is released.
Caveat emptor!
Horrible Problems/No support March 18, 2008
18 out of 22 found this review helpful
This is a horrible product. After buying it at Macworld and waiting until March to finally get it I attempted to install. It quits before you can make a profile. Tried it on 2 other compuers at work and the same thing happens. Tried to get help but have waited 2 weeks for someone to call me back and no body has. Their support system on their website is now unavailable. What gives with these guys. It is completely useless to me and they want a 15% restocking fee to return the product. Beware.
Can't cross-grade, can't even update iListen to 1.8 March 17, 2008
12 out of 21 found this review helpful
I've tried to use iListen (with the recommended headset) with almost no luck, and working far harder than if I just do the typing. Imagine my excitement when I saw that MacSpeech had adopted and adapted the Dragon speech-recognition system to the Macintosh. So I went to cross-grade and was told that they couldn't recognize my email address. My registered copy of iListen apparently must be upgraded to 1.8 from 1.7 before I can cross-grade. (I'm sorry, but I have to say that I hate that neologism.) But I can't update because, despite having a registered copy of iListen 1.7 I get an error message trying to download the upgrader in order to cross-grade, which strikes me as being patently retrograde.
I review technology for people who need various sorts of assistive software and hardware (I do lectures to seniors and people with disabilities) and frankly I had great hopes for this one. But I would never advise a person who already needs some special help in using technology that they should try to use either the MacSpeech web site or its software until I see some dramatic changes. When that happens, I promise to update this "review."
So, a warning. Wait until this thing is out on the market for a while. MacSpeech has posted an arbitrary cross-grade date of March 20-something, and they are likely to be so busy dealing with the anger that that engenders that they won't be of any use for months. (Surely 1.0 won't be flawless.) As for me, I happen to own an XP machine as well, and I will use Dragon Dictate or my fingers until I start to see really positive reviews.
Update: The cross-grade process seems to have worked. I finally got through to get the 1.8 upgrade for iListen, so that I could then order the MacSpeech Dictate crossgrade via FedEx. It's on its way, purportedly. A review of the new software should follow in a few days.
MacSpeech Dictate 1.0 NOT A Real Release March 15, 2008
34 out of 40 found this review helpful
MacSpeech Dicate is a product that replaces the company's "long-in-the-tooth" iListen software.
I owned iListen for years and paid for many updates, but the software never worked well enough to actually use it.
The promise of MacSpeech Dicate is that it will actually recognize speech because it has a completely new recognition engine licensed from the Dragon Dictate people.
Upon installing the software and going through a short training session, I found that Dictate did a pretty good job of recognizing my speech--even when using my MacBook Pro's built-in microphone, which NOT an officially supported device.
There were, however, some problems that I encountered using Dictate, including one that crashed the software. The way the software handles crashes is quite a kludge: the software puts up a warning message, opens a web browser that has instructions to follow, and opens up the Mac OS X console log so that the user can (or is expected to) copy the log, paste it into a mail message, and send the message off to MacSpeech.
Other products I've used have more automated and elegant ways of handling crash reporting.
The 1.0 version of Dictate does not handle learning specific mis-recognized words in a user-friendly fashion; this functionality is promised "later this year." Likewise, Dictate ships without any document or help system whatsoever.
Based on the amateurish manner in which crash reporting is handled, coupled with the complete absence of documentation/online help, I must rate this software as early Beta rather than general release 1.0 quality.
In its current incarnation, I could not recommend buying this product at the $190 price point. MacSpeech's web site has all kinds of fancy words stating why the product isn't available for purchase (yet) because they are (supposedly) taking care of their cross-grade customers; however, I believe they are actually charging their cross-grade customers $80 to do their Beta testing for them. Generally a bad move!
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