A friend of mine (also a Mac owner) recently broke her right hand and has two 6-10 page papers due this week. Is there a way to use the Speech feature to type in word processors? I'm not seeing anything in the help documents for textedit or openoffice... help!
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Speech typing?
- Thread starter jimijazz
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
mkrishnan
Moderator emeritus
For free, no. There are products like iListen that have been discussed here before... they're not cheap, they're not perfect, and most of them have a learning curve. They are not sufficiently technologically advanced that a new user can step up to the microphone, dictate an essay, and get usable results on the first try.
Dragon Naturally Speaking is the popular in my circles (e.g. for medical records, primarily), but it's not available for OS X. It's definitely not something that you invest in to use twice this week and then not use again. It would be much cheaper for her to pay for human transcription from a voice recording...
Dragon Naturally Speaking is the popular in my circles (e.g. for medical records, primarily), but it's not available for OS X. It's definitely not something that you invest in to use twice this week and then not use again. It would be much cheaper for her to pay for human transcription from a voice recording...
mkrishnan
Moderator emeritus
No probs... last year, I got really interested in experimenting with dictating neuropsych patient reports and psychotherapy progress notes to help train myself to write them more quickly.
There were several nuisances that were relevant to me:
- For most of this software, you can't use the condenser mic on a notebook, meaning I would have to carry a microphone with my notebook
- They were pricey
- I got mixed feedback from people who'd tried it before me that it actually speeded their workflow.
I ultimately instead started setting timer challenges to write the notes more quickly using a keyboard. Fortunately for me, I type rather quickly. 😉
It might be better to start googling for online services that do transcription from your MP3 file... it might be cheaper and (more to the point) more convenient than if you do it locally.... Some quick Googling found one that did something like $1.50/min, but I have no idea if that's good or not.
There were several nuisances that were relevant to me:
- For most of this software, you can't use the condenser mic on a notebook, meaning I would have to carry a microphone with my notebook
- They were pricey
- I got mixed feedback from people who'd tried it before me that it actually speeded their workflow.
I ultimately instead started setting timer challenges to write the notes more quickly using a keyboard. Fortunately for me, I type rather quickly. 😉
It might be better to start googling for online services that do transcription from your MP3 file... it might be cheaper and (more to the point) more convenient than if you do it locally.... Some quick Googling found one that did something like $1.50/min, but I have no idea if that's good or not.