Check it out:
New Tools to Bolster Mac’s World – New York Times
The other Mac software news this month is more exciting.
For years, the industry’s most amazing speech-recognition program has been Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows. In its latest version, I got 98.9 percent accuracy right out of the box, without even reading the training scripts.
On the Mac, though, the only speech-recognition option was a program called iListen, which was built on far less sophisticated speech technology from Philips. Seven years ago, I asked iListen’s creator, a former Dragon engineer named Andrew Taylor, why on earth he’d based his Mac program on the Philips software instead of Dragon’s.
The answer, it turns out, was that the Dragon technology would cost too much, and the conditions for using it were too onerous, in Mr. Taylor’s view. He went with the Philips software, but never gave up his dream of bringing Dragon technology to the Mac.
Eventually, the Mac’s popularity rose, new bosses took over at Nuance (the current owner of the Dragon technology) and Mr. Taylor finally landed a deal.
The new program, MacSpeech Dictate ($200 with headset), is a big deal, especially for the thousands of Mac lovers who have been running Windows all these years just so they could use Dragon NaturallySpeaking.