At the MacWorld conference in SF this past January I met the people who created iListen, a voice dictation and command program. Since I write a lot and am beginning to feel the minor symptoms of repetitive use effects in my thumbs, I thought I’d give it a go.

The program, combined with a microphone (I’m using the Parrot TalkPro), learns the nuances of your voice. It uses a combination of sound (phonemes) and context recognition. I’m still in the process of “training” it by reading texts in its training database. Since it knows what I am reading, it is gathering data on the way I speak. After 2 (out of about 10) training sections I tried reading some random passages from Covey’s 7 Habits and got about 75% accuracy.

Charles Moore wrote a very comprehensive review of iListen. He’s been using iListen for several years and several versions and had positive (but not blind) praise for the product. He actually mentions several features that I was unaware of (the documentation from MacSpeech is not super user friendly. There are 4 different pdf manuals that I’m learning to sort through to find answers to my questions.)

Seeing what errors iListen made provided an interesting look into what other people might hear when I speak. Reminds me to not speak too quickly and to enunciate, especially with people who don’t speak English as a first language.