i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

"Finally, Professional Dictation Software for the Mac"

According to the article, Andrew Taylor worked on creating speech recognition software for the Mac for 10 years while his competitor, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, made their own version.  In February of 2010 Dragon, now Nuance, bought Andrew's company and gave his team access to all of the company's dictation-software expertise, marketing power and other resources.

With these new resources they created Dragon Dictate for the Mac.  It runs in the background and translates everything you say into typewritten text into any Mac program.

If you speak clearly and don't have much of an accent the software is surprisingly accurate.  You can make corrections verbally.  And as you make corrections the software continually improves by learning how you speak.

One problem mentioned in the article is that if you use the mouse the software forgets where you are.  That's a bug they haven't been able to fix yet in the Mac version.

Notes:

Who is organizing: The Dragon Dictate software and the user are organizing together.

What is being organized: Verbal text is being organized. Audio input is being transcribed from sound waves into parsed words.

Why is it being organized: It is being organized so that a user can speak instead of typing into a keyboard.  With macros a user can also abbreviate common input and shorten their time spent dictating.

How much is it being organized:  It is being organized to the extent that the software recognizes what you are saying.  Every time you correct a mistake it learns how to translate what it hears you say into what you mean by it.

When is it being organized:  The software is organizing your ideas on the fly, at runtime.  Every time you speak it listens and records it.  Every macro you record is identified at runtime and translated.

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/finally-professional-dictation-software-for-the-mac/