Thursday, March 13, 2008

Initial Test of MacSpeech Dictate -- This program is the new Messiah

This is a test. I am one of the only people I know who owns a bird. I am a 2006 graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, and I hold a bachelor of arts from the University of Michigan. I am a very striking redhead who sings in a powerful tenor.

The preceding paragraph was my first test of the new MacSpeech Dictate software. The program made zero mistakes. I did not have to correct anything. The accuracy of the software is leaps and bounds ahead of iListen, it frustrated me to no end.

In the past two paragraphs, the only mistake the program made was inserting the word "it" instead of the word "which" in the last sentence. I have been speaking at a perfectly normal conversational pace, the same way I would to a friend. I have not overly enunciated anything. This program is, without a doubt, miraculous.

I want to make it very clear that the only training I have completed was the initial five-minute training session in which I read 10 or so paragraphs. I am already achieving near 100% accuracy, with essentially no training whatsoever. This is in comparison to iListen, which, after several months of training, was never able to afford any more than 90% accuracy at best.

In the past several paragraphs, the voice recognition software has made only two minor errors which did not actually affect the meaning of the sentence. (The second error was the word "any" at the end of the last paragraph.) I will play around with the software a lot more over the next couple of days, and post a full review at that point, but I can already say that this is absolutely amazing. I am simply blown away. I had high hopes, but I never dreamed that the program would work this well right out of the box.

Let the next Great American Novel begin!

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