by Matthew Stoton

When IBM ViaVoice first appeared on the scene, the first generation of speech recognition, it was hailed supreme. Not surprisingly, since it was the only continuous speech recognition software available for the Mac. Now the second wave of speech software has landed with IBM ViaVoice 2.0 and iListen 1.0. This next generation is aimed at dictation and control. By allowing you to control and dictate, this software helps you keep your hands off the mouse. iListen's speech engine (licensed from Philips) is advertised as faster than IBM's, but can it outshine the revolutionary ViaVoice?

You Listen: Installing iListen is a breeze, though slightly dull. But beware: it won't work on OS X and stability on 9.1 varies, it is recommended that you use 9.0.4. When you first open iListen you are asked to make a profile and setup your microphone and voice model. After naming your profile you must set the gain and "Silence Detection Level", or SDL. Setting the gain can be tricky; set it too high and signal quality depreciates, too low and it can't hear you. You can have it set this automatically by listening to you but it may fail if you talk unevenly. For most people it should be set to about 50% to 75%. It ignores sounds below a certain level so that things like breathing and background noises are ignored (the SDL). The SDL should be about half of the gain. So if your gain is 66% SDL should be set to 33%. This may vary depending on your voice and environment.

One more story, Please: The most annoying part of today's speech recognition is reading stories. This not only goes against the idea of "you talk, it types", but is also time consuming and relatively boring. iListen brings shorter and somewhat more interesting stories. Even with the promise of 85% to 95% accuracy after the first story, it is wise to read them all. Without the extra information the software will blunder on most words, making dictation nearly impossible. Still, command mode works beautifully regardless of how many stories you have read, and spell mode is also unaffected. Don't worry though, you will be saved from reading pages of "Treasure Island". iListen gives you a mixture of short and long stories, most of which relate to speech recognition. Reading all the stories is the only way for dictation to shine; otherwise performance may be less-than expected.

Commanding or Controlling?: Apple's feeble attempt at command-control software isn't exactly beautiful. Even though iListen is dictation software it sports a powerful command-control mode that almost outshines the dictation. It uses the Philips' FreeSpeech 2000 engine instead of Apple's PlainTalk. This allows it to overcome the common difficulties associated with PlainTalk technology, such as getting bogged down after several commands and generally poor performance. With iListen, commands are recognized instantly and missed commands are nonexistent (if settings are correct). Menu control isn't working yet and therefore not in iListen, it should be working in version 1.1 or 1.2.

Spell Me: Ahh, Spell Mode, that delightfully clunky version of dictation. In IBM ViaVoice Spelling Mode is used for uncommon words or for correction. In iListen this is used mainly for those words that iListen doesn't know. Since there is no way to teach iListen words, Spell Mode becomes somewhat overused. As usual, it doesn't work incredibly well and is no better than IBM's. Hopefully, when learning commands becomes possible (in version 1.1 or 1.2) it will make dictation less reliant on this clumsy feature.

Toss that keyboard!: Using voice to replace the keyboard is the goal of dictation software, and iListen almost does just that. iListen can dictate faster and more accurately than IBM ViaVoice Millennium Edition, thanks to the FreeSpeech 2000 engine. iListen's dictation can work inside any application, but this comes with a cost. iListen has no correction features, forcing you to reach for the keyboard every time you make a mistake. As long as you train it enough, it won't make many mistakes keeping keyboard usage to a minimum. This problem will be fixed in version 1.1 or 1.2 which will be a free update, so it is no reason not to buy this version. In short, dictation is much faster and more accurate than what IBM has to offer.

To Talk or to Type: In the end, iListen is better than IBM ViaVoice. Even when considering the youthfulness of this program it comes on top in almost every way. A bigger decision is to talk instead of type, and it does take time for both you and the software to adjust. iListen will inevitably increase your productivity and ease your wrists. It isn't perfect, lacking OS X support for example, but it is definitely worth it. iListen finally proves that speech recognition is not just for those with wrist injuries. This is the first step towards keyboard and mouse elimination, lets just hope that it stays on course.

Product: iListen 1.0
Company: MacSpeech
MSRP: $139......5/21/01
Hits: Fast, accurate, reliable dictation software.
Misses: Dull interface, no correction mode, lack of Mac OS X support, flawed spell mode.
Rating: 4 out of 5

Matthew Stoton is a freelance writer, webdesigner and software developer.
You can view his work and more at his site, Totally Macintosh. He also offers
free technical support. You can reach him at:
rjsanddls@aol.com