iListen

Rating:
Summary: iListen review for the Alaska Apple Users' Group
Review:
When the time came to write this review, I unfortunately came down with a case of laryngitis and therefore found the review quite a bit more challenging! I then worked on trying to get the program to deal with my hoarse voice... but iListen came through pretty well, and I wrote this review with very little use of the keyboard.

IListen is, quite simply, a powerful, comprehensive voice recognition and command system for the Macintosh. It uses a system of recognizing sounds and putting them into context to create words or commands on your Mac (horrific oversimplification). I have played around with systems like this in the past, and I'll admit that I have been less than impressed with the results. The voice recognition system that comes with OS 9 and 10 certainly didn't hold up to hard use (and doesn't have a dictation mode, anyway) and my interest in a robust system is more than a passing interest, in that my work requires me to dictate large quantities of text at very high rate of speed. Accuracy and ability to easily correct my errors are also paramount to me, and so it was with great interest that I loaded up iListen and set about trying to use it for simple home applications.

Set up of the program was very easy, and with a little bit of messing around with system preferences I got the program fully working. There is a somewhat lengthy initial period of training the program to recognize your voice, which consists of reading chunks of text into this system so that it can learn your particular style of speech. Interestingly enough, the program is also capable of assimilating text documents you have already made to try and learn your style of writing. The more time and effort you put into the training period (both initially and along the way, any time you like), the better the program does with your speech.


IListen has several modes of function, including a dictation mode, a spelling mode, and a command mode. There is a great deal of customizability to the system, and you can certainly add extra words, your own macros, and your own phonetics. The program is engineered to recognize natural, full-speed speech: no awkward pauses or exaggerations - you just talk, fast as you like, in your normal speaking style. You can use iListen to dictate documents in virtually any program, and you can even just use the program to command your Mac in a hands-free manner. There is quite a bit of learning involved in getting all of the available commands down, but the program is surprisingly flexible, and I'm confident that with frequent use it will continue to just get better and better at its job.

Ideally, I would love to challenge this program by taking it to my office, seeing an entire schedule of patients, and then dictating all my encounters for that day into the program at my regular full-bore speed, just to see how well it handles my mumbling, my medical jargon, and my particular and at times unconventional syntax. Unfortunately, there are some privacy laws that are going to get in the way of that experiment, but in the future I certainly could see myself getting a hand-held Dictaphone and plugging it into a computer at the end of the day, correcting my dictations, and then printing them so that they can go back into the chart that day! (And for quite a bit less than the cost of transcription, the fees for which are sizable.)


After some initial growing pains, I must say that I have been impressed with the results this program can produce. Even with a fairly rudimentary training period, the accuracy of the program is reasonably good, even now as I sit here and dictate this review, recovering from laryngitis.

Overall, I found the program to be quite flexible and customizable, and greatly capable of learning from its mistakes. Its initial recognition rate is quite good, and the percentage improves with more time and effort put into training the program. And mentally, the "widget factor" is quite substantial, but in all seriousness the implications of programs like this are potentially important in fields that involve dictation and voice commands. Obviously people who can't use their hands and fingers have had use for programs like this for quite some time, and those possibilities are exciting as well.

Initially, I thought I had found the program to be buggy in getting correction mode going properly, but found that I simply had not set the System preferences properly (as the instructions had stated), and after setting the universal access preferences properly, I had no further significant problems in using this program. I tested the program on a high end G5 Macintosh with plenty of physical RAM, and I found performance to be excellent; I'm not sure how iListen would fare on a slower system, but I've seen user reports on the net that indicate that its performance is satisfactory on G3 PowerBooks.

Although I have not used any competing products (e.g., Via Voice), I rate this program highly and would recommend that anyone with an interest in putting voice recognition to work for them give iListen a try. One caveat, though: iListen requires a quality microphone (preferably a headset) to function optimally; I bought a Telex H-851 microphone use for this review, and I've found its performance to be very good with iListen. The MacSpeech website lists compatible microphone hardware, and as of the time of this review, the iSight is not among the compatible devices listed (I think its microphone is not directional enough to work well with iListen).