MacSpeech ships Scribe, Scribe Dictate add-ons
updated 01:20 pm EST, Thu February 11, 2010
Dictate iPhone app coming soon
Developer MacSpeech has launched Scribe, a new transcription program. The app takes audio files and translates them into text documents; some supported audio formats include AIFF, WAV, MP4 and M4A. Users must provide several minutes of training, but the software then recognizes up to six individuals, and 13 English dialects. Editing tools let users clean up documents, or add words and acronyms to the vocabulary.
A solo version of Scribe costs $149, and requires Mac OS X 10.6. Also available are Scribe Legal and Scribe Medical, add-on editions for Dictate Legal and Dictate Medical, respectively. Dictate Legal recognizes over 30,000 spoken law terms, whereas Medical covers terms for fields like cardiology, dentistry, gynecology and psychiatry. The Scribe add-ons cost $99 apiece.
MacSpeech says it is also planning to release a Dictate iPhone app. Though no release date has been set, the app is being demonstrated this week at Macworld, and will serve as a "remote extension" of Dictate for the desktop. It should be available for free.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Nov 2001
What the hey!
Why can Google understand spoken words without any training, with words spoken in noisy environments, and with ordinary microphones, while MacSpeech's products can't.