The two firms weren't in competition and didn't use independent engines, so it's hard to see the deal being a net loss to innovation. That's why yesterday's announcement was an exciting one. and Dragon offered the same capabilities as a menu item inside NaturallySpeaking's Preferred edition (which goes for the same price as Dictate alone at Amazon). Given that it uses the same recognition engine and simply relies on audio files instead of microphones for input, this is quite expensive. For instance, the company just launched MacSpeech Scribe, which transcribes already recorded audio, and priced it at $149.

And, when MacSpeech did introduce new features, they could be bundled as separate products. The base Dictate product cost more than the base version of NaturallySpeaking, despite its limited feature set. Compared to the same tools in NaturallySpeaking, Dictate's superstructure was Mac-specific-but also primitive. If you needed to jump around between applications, however, or perform numerous edits and corrections, or train the custom vocabulary, Dictate was (and is) a terrific hassle. Recognition accuracy was superb, but the small MacSpeech team never had the time to build the rest of the software into a truly compelling alternative for Mac users.ĭictate worked great with long blocks of dictated text. Dictate's engine was licensed directly from Nuance, and it was the same engine powering NaturallySpeaking on the Windows platform (read our review). The company had its own product called iListen, but it never turned in spectacular performance and was dumped in 2008 for the new MacSpeech Dictate (read our review). That's because MacSpeech was never a truly independent offering. Typically, this would be bad news for innovation, but the buyout might actually work to the advantage of Mac fans who are sick of running Nuance's NaturallySpeaking under Boot Camp or virtualization in order to access the far more advanced features of the Windows product. Wednesday's announcement that speech recognition giant Nuance was acquiring the scrappy Mac vendor MacSpeech means that if you want a standalone voice recognition app for Windows or for Mac, you're down to a single choice.

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