Mac Speech Voice Recognition Software Review

I decided to try out a piece of voice recognition software called Mac Speech. I watched a couple demo videos of people using the software on Youtube, and became intrigued, so I figured why not give it a shot. I was hoping that I would be able to use the software to speed up my article writing. I figured that I would probably be able to speak much faster than I can type, and therefore it would take me less time to write.

The software was very easy to install and setup. After I went through the initial installation of the software, it prompted me to "train" the software to recognize the unique way that I speak, as to reduce the number of errors when dictating. I was rather impressed with how quickly I was able to train the software. I'd estimate that it took about 5 minutes or less.

Now, bear in mind, I have always been pretty good at reading aloud, and I don't have a thick dialect. I pretty much have your typical, generic American English accent. So that might have had something to do with how quickly the training went. If you have a thick Australian or Scottish accent, it might be a lot harder to rain the Mac Speech software.

Once the Mac Speech training was complete, and I was given the green light to start using it, I decided to open up MS Word and put it to the real test. To my surprise, it actually worked very well. There a couple commands you need to get used to like, "PERIOD, COMMA, NEW LINE, NEW PARAGRAPH, etc..." for inserting punctuation and formatting. The opening paragraph of this article was written using Mac Speech.

Now you're probably wondering, "why only the opening paragraph?" Well, although Mac Speech was able to recognize what I was saying with almost no errors, and it was much faster than typing, it seemed to be slowing me down in the long run because of how awkward I felt using it. I would compare the feeling to leaving a message on someone's answering machine.

There's just something strange about talking out loud when sitting in a room by myself. You also have to make sure you speak very loudly and clearly, kind of like a news caster, otherwise the software won't pick up what you're saying. So it's not anything like conversational speech. As someone who likes to smoke a lot and drink lots of coffee, I found that by the time I finished the training module and then wrote the first paragraph of this article, my voice was already starting to become a bit dried out and coarse.

Maybe I just need to practice a little more with it and get used to dictating. Regardless, I would still give Mac Speech a good rating. On a scale of 1 - 5, I would give it a 4. It does exactly what it claims to do. If you think you would prefer speaking aloud opposed to typing, and you are a Mac user, I would definitely recommend this software.