IBM VIAVOICE Simply Dictation Mac OS X

List Price: $49.99 Discount Price: $42.12

Features:

• Use your voice to dictate, edit, and correct text
• 160,000 word vocabulary; G4 processors optimization
• Audio edit documents with Text-to-Speech feature
• Easily transfer documents into other text-based programs
• Great for creating letters, stories, reports, memos, and email

Customer Reviews:

Neat software! [Posted on 2005-08-19]
I recently purchased this software to experiment with voice recognition. I am dictating this review using ViaVoice Simply Dictation. After only an hour of set up, I find that the software is incredibly easy to use. I can tell with this will take some time to be used to, but would recommend it to anyone interested in the technology.

This version is NOT compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger [Posted on 2006-01-12]
This version is NOT compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The manufacturer says a new version may be available in 2006. Be aware: the box says it is compatible with 10.1 and 10.3, but doesn't say anything about 10.2 and 10.4. Of course I had to find this out after I received it since Amazon doesn't mention it.

More trouble than it's worth [Posted on 2006-06-13]
Clunky with system 10.3, I agree with the previous reviewer, this is not functioning properly in system 10.4. It wasn't worthwhile when I bought it, but I was too slow finding a USB compatible microphone to find out before refund period ended. Pass.

Stay away from IBM Viavoice for Mac osx [Posted on 2006-08-24]
This program consistently fails to recognize even the slowest speech. I've trained it for three readings and it still makes a huge amount of errors. The errors don't even resemble a phonetic approximation, let alone what I dictated. Correction is user hostile. It doesn't seem to learn as I painfully try to correct the spellings. This voice recognition software isn't one tenth of Dragon Naturally Speaking for the PC.

Note on compatibility [Posted on 2008-01-18]
I used ViaVoice for about two years. It was spooky accurate at times. I found that if I read the training texts in my most normal voice (do not read slowly!), it worked very well. In fact, it seemed to be more accurate at faster speech speeds than in slower ones.

Anyway, in regard to compatibility, I don't think the issue is the OS version as much as it is the processor type. When I bought my Mac Mini with the Intel processor it wasn't supported by ViaVoice. I had to keep my old computer to run it.

One last thing, back up your training files. If there's a crash you won't have to retrain it.

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