ViaVoice & Internal Microphone

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Dennis Lougheed - 29 Nov 2004 19:46 GMT

Can IBM's ViaVoice for Mac OSX Release 3 be made to work with the iMac Flat
screen's internal microphone?

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Jim Jennings - 29 Nov 2004 22:37 GMT

> Can IBM's ViaVoice for Mac OSX Release 3 be made to work with the iMac Flat
> screen's internal microphone?

I don't think so. I couldn't get it to work. From the support website
I gathered that a particular kind of USB microphone was required.

I bought a USB noise filtering microphone (on a headset with
headphones), which seems to work pretty good with OS X, but I still
never got ViaVoice to work. I remember concluding that the problem
might have been an issue with the latest update of OS X, whatever that
was, which required a not-yet-available update to ViaVoice. I don't
remember why I concluded that.

That was several months ago. I have't checked for updates since then.

IBM seems to have sold ViaVoice to someone else and I saw several
speculations that support would now decrease. If you haven't bought
ViaVoice yet, do some web searching first for reviews and opinions. I
wish I had. If you figure out how to make it work, please let me
know...

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Jim Jennings, Bureau of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin
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matt neuburg - 30 Nov 2004 00:44 GMT

> I bought a USB noise filtering microphone (on a headset with
> headphones), which seems to work pretty good with OS X, but I still
> never got ViaVoice to work

ViaVoice works fine for me on an iMac G5 using the latest version of
Panther. So whatever problem you may be having is presumably not
related to software. ViaVoice does require a specialized microphone; I
don't think you can use the built-in microphone on any computer. This
message was typed using ViaVoice. m.

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RB - 30 Nov 2004 01:16 GMT

> ViaVoice works fine for me on an iMac G5 using the latest version of
> Panther. So whatever problem you may be having is presumably not
> related to software. ViaVoice does require a specialized microphone; I
> don't think you can use the built-in microphone on any computer. This
> message was typed using ViaVoice. m.

What version of ViaVoice? I'm very interested in getting Voice
Recognition going, and had heard that ViaVoice was no longer available,
so I bought iListen (formerly affiliated with the Dragon SW...?)
anyway, I've only begun, and it's too early to tell how successful it
will be, but I'm interested in maybe finding a used copy of ViaVoice as
a second try.

How much "learning" did your machine have to do before it was reliable
for voice recognition?

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matt neuburg - 30 Nov 2004 01:56 GMT

> > ViaVoice works fine for me on an iMac G5 using the latest version of
> > Panther. So whatever problem you may be having is presumably not
[quoted text clipped - 11 lines]
> How much "learning" did your machine have to do before it was reliable
> for voice recognition?

Quite a bit. You must read all the "stories", and then you must use
SpeakPad and the correction feature. But after you've done this for a
while, accuracy becomes extremely high. Part of the secret is learning
to talk, of course. m.

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Davoud - 30 Nov 2004 05:23 GMT

RB:

> > How much "learning" did your machine have to do before it was reliable
> > for voice recognition?

matt neuburg:

> Quite a bit. You must read all the "stories", and then you must use
> SpeakPad and the correction feature. But after you've done this for a
> while, accuracy becomes extremely high. Part of the secret is learning
> to talk, of course. m.

I'm so envious. I could never keep VV working properly long enough to
use the SpeakPad and the correction feature. That's on several
different Macs running X. It would just quit transcribing at some
point. I know that I'm not alone in this. Anyway, I gave up on VV for
the Mac and now I run a version of VV that was bundled with a digital
voice recorder on my Windows laptop.

Davoud

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usenet *at* davidillig dawt com

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Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / November 2004

ViaVoice & Internal Microphone