MacSpeech Dictate - 1.5.7

I purchased this product at version 1.5.5, and after it trained me, I was quite happy with it. I have a repetitive stress injury, so speaking instead of typing is a good thing.

But this 1.5.6 version is not working. I think it's a problem with the interaction with MS Word. The enhancement was to be able to turn off the Auto Cache, which is something I wanted. But now I can't run Word and Dictate at the same time or else Dictate crashes at random times.

I recommend it because it's the only thing out there.

In July I purchased the 1.5 upgrade, which was absurdly overpriced at $54.95 for an incremental upgrade and bug fix. On top of it, I had to pay a $31.77 delivery charge to Canada. People mail me disks all the time from the U.S. for a couple of dollars. A month later I receive a bill for brokerage fee from FedEx for another $18.

So I paid $50 for them to mail me a disk on top of the incremental upgrade, for a total of $105.

I can hardly wait to see what they'll charge for version 2.

Derek Boles

I have been a registered user, and upgrader -- since this product was introduced
eons ago at MacWorld. I bought two seats based on a demo. After lengthy
'training' and tweaks... the program is still as inaccurate and buggy as it was when
I first used it.

I suspect that the recognition engine is the fault as the Google Search app on
my Iphone works flawlessly -- without training and tweaks -- and does so on an
iPhone mic at arms length in a noisy car.

Avoid this at all costs. It is not worth the money -- and importantly -- the time.

This used to be a good product. However, a recent bug has made it nearly unusabl.e You can see this bug in the text that I am now speakign. I'm leaving the typos in place as an exampel. For some reason, MacSpeech has begun to reverse the last two letters of some words. Sometimes, it reverses the last lettre and the punctuation. An example of that is in the title abov.e I can't believe that MacSpeech doesn't fix this proble.m It has been around for quite a while. I have reviewed all the text in this posting, and the typos that you see here were introduced by MacSpeehc. See, it even screws up the word "MacSpeech". (But then other times it does not).

Dictate is one of the most unstable and generally poorly designed major pieces of software I have ever had the misfortune to be stuck using.

Far from being a major improvement over MacSpeech's previous product, iListen, Dictate still feels as twitchy and poorly thought out as iListen ever did, even after a year and a half of development and at least two major updates. The only real improvement is that Dictate is based on a far superior speech recognition engine (and that's not nothing). However, it's a lot less use if the software wrapped around the engine totally sucks.

I purchased Dictate shortly after its release in early 2008, and have barely had a day of trouble-free use of the product ever since. Routine hanging and crashing has been the main problem. Due to an egregious Canadian localization bug, for several months I had to choose between a version of Dictate that would literally not launch all, and an older version that merely crashed frequently.

When 1.5 was release recently (May 09), I hoped I would finally be able to use Dictate with fewer hassles, but no such luck. Even running on a well-maintained year-old MacBook Pro, Dictate 1.5 (and 1.5.1) is as crashy as ever. Within minutes of using the new version, CPU usage spikes to 98% and stayed there — not just bringing dictate to all but the entire machine, and even refusing to force quit. Lovely. Such experiences have been the rule with Dictate from the beginning!

For many months I communicated regularly with MacSpeech about my frustrations with their product. I cooperated diligently with a great deal of troubleshooting. I was often treated like I was some kind of “problem” customer, despite the fact that I have some empathy for the kind of frustrations tech support workers have to cope with and try pretty hard to be nice to them. Some weren’t so bad, of course. But despite the professionalism of some individual tech support professionals at MacSpeech, the overall customer service experience was abominable.

Ultimately, MacSpeech simply was not willing to stand behind their product in any substantive way. I am a deeply annoyed customer.