Macintosh

Virtually every feature of the program has been enhanced, and key functions have been added. Vocabulary support has been increased, and specialized vocabularies for attorneys and physicians are available. More extensive application and system voice controls are included, as well as support for direct dictation into X or OS 9 text applications.

As before, a ViaVoice set up assistant guides you through the enrollment process. It gauges ambient voice, tests the audio capabilities of the noise-canceling microphone and provides several stories for you to dictate, enabling the application to develop a speech profile of your individual speech characteristics.

Although the enrollment process is tedious, it’s integral to developing accurate dictation. Once the reading process is complete, ViaVoice analyzes your speech and creates a speech profile of your personal characteristics. You can further augment the profile by submitting text documents that contain words you customarily use in your practice to ViaVoice to analyze. I provided several legal documents for the program to analyze, and it learned the legal-specific terms contained in those documents. The time required to analyze your speech pattern has been reduced by about 20 percent in Version X.

Virtually any application that accepts text input can be used for dictation by ViaVoice X. You can directly dictate into AppleWorks, Microsoft Word 98 or higher, Office v. X, Netscape, Outlook Express, Eudora and e-mail clients. However, you get the best performance when dictating into IBM’s proprietary SpeakPad application. I noticed a slight speed hit, for example, when dictating into Office X. Dictation directly into SpeakPad, however, was almost instantaneous.

In theory, you don’t lose any functionality when dictating into SpeakPad because you can immediately transfer the dictation into text applications such as Word. Simply state “Transfer to Microsoft Word,” and SpeakPad will copy the contents of your document and transfer it directly into a blank Word document. I simply couldn’t get this feature to work with Office X, however, although it worked flawlessly in a demo at the IBM booth at MacWorld San Francisco.

Ambient noise, however slight, causes minor problems with ViaVoice. For example, when pausing between sentences while dictating this review, the word “the” would intermittently appear although I had not spoken. To avoid mistypes, use a universal serial bus (USB) “on/off” switch between your microphone input and computer.

As I stated, ViaVoice comes standard with a 160,000 word vocabulary for general dictation — at least twice the volume of previous versions. Options include extensive legal and medical vocabularies, priced at $142 each. Unfortunately, you can’t load the medical and legal vocabularies simultaneously, so those attorneys in medical malpractice will have to augment their own custom vocabularies.

ViaVoice Mac OS X’s improved command-and-control features work over a wide range of Mac OS X applications and in the Finder. For example, any application located in the Mac OS X “Application Folder” can be launched and controlled extensively using voice commands. You can launch the “calculator” application to perform numerical calculations using voice commands. You can say, “surf the Web,” and ViaVoice launches Internet Explorer. The program also beefed up its text formatting capabilities particularly in SpeakPad.

As with any speech-to-text application, accuracy improves as you train the application and speak clearly. ViaVoice is typical in this respect. If you stay with the program, augment your vocabulary and make the corrections, you will see more accurate, speedy transcription.

Documentation is a little sparse, but covers the essentials of the package. The program includes a high-end noise-canceling digital microphone that would run half the cost of the program if purchased separately.

For this article, actual dictation, correction and editing time was about a half hour. To simply dictate and correct, it would have only taken about five minutes.

Price: $171; $19.95 upgrade for Mac Enhanced Edition users; $142 for Legal Vocabulary add-on

Mac OS X Version 10.1; 300MHz G3 or higher

Reviewed by David A. Saraceno, a practicing attorney and operator of MotionLaw, a forensic animation consulting firm in Spokane, Wash.

Apr/May '02 Issue

PROS
Twice the base vocabulary; legal/medical lexicons available; fast and accurate with training; extensive command/control functions; slick, extensive OS X interface.

CONS
Only as good as you make it; problems with Microsoft Office v. X transfers; steep hardware/software requirements.

VERDICT
If you are in OS X and an attorney, this is a must-have.

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Updated 03/26/02
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