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can my mac type for me?

J

JustOneQuickONe

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 4, 2008
257
0
I know it is possible to have my mac say what I have typed but can I switch the roles around? Can I talk into a mic plugged into the mac and have it type the words for me into a document? I'm taking notes for school and am trying to type them but I have to look at my keyboard to type and end up losing my spot and all that, its taking me longer and being less productive than I anticipated. It would save me so much time and effort if I could just read out of the book the important parts and have my computer type them.
Any ideas, or programs I could get to enable this?
 
so the only way to go is 3rd party applications? Are there any decent free one's out there?
Does anyone know if their university book store carries any software like this? I could go check mine when I get back to school but just wondering if anyone else has checked.
 
Dragon is pretty universally available at University Bookstores. MacSpeech might or might not be.

There are open source projects -- I don't know of one that's really considered prime-time usable... it's not as easy as you think.
 
Another name is speech-to-text

I use MacSpeech Dictate. It's perfect for what you want to do. You all just need to read clearly, but then you can get the words "typed" in real quick like.
 
I don't really like these kind of software. Sometimes it just doesn't understand at all or misshear what you're actually trying to say so you take more time correcting it than what you could take writing.
 
theDUB said:
Forget Dragon Naturally Speaking, you need this.
Click to expand...

Pretty much this. I self-taught myself to touch-type, funny enough because I would use AIM so often during my high school years that I just forced myself not to look.

That, and for typing up copies of hand-written reports for final drafts...quite a few years, later, still going strong!
 
You'll need to train the program for your voice. If you speak with an accent, it will confuse the system. You're more likely to be successful if you learn to use the keyboard without looking.
 
I have personally used, I forget the name, I think its dictate. I feel it sucked, and I would rather suffer through typing. I would talk to the thing and if it wasn't absolutely perfect it would mess it up. At times it would not recognize a word and jack up the whole sentence. I was using it to transcribe some of my geology notes, and it was not happy with all the scientific mumbo jumbo I was throwing at it. Spend your time on some typing software and get faster, it will be better.
 
The technical terms are a big issue on the speech-to-tex. The vocabulary of the program is not too likely to include some weird geologic terms. I wonder how it would type a spoken 'jurassic'? Ur ass?
 
yeah i was planning on using it for biology and I'm pretty sure a lot of those words probably won't be recognizable by the software so I'm probably going a diff. rout.
 
I had IBM Via Voice back in my PC days and you could train it to to recognise technical terms that you use regularly. If you wanted to do it out the outset, you could just go through loads of the words and train it. You could also do macros, so you could just say something like "end letter" and it would take care of the signing off of the letter for you.
 
I never got used to any speaking software. Dragon is alright, I guess, since I have used it like once or twice on a PC laptop.

Typing is the best anyways. A lot less annoying than to recite what your teacher says into notes... when you're in a class with others typing quietly. ;)
 
Testing my speech program

One cool thing someone said is speech to text has perfect spelling, if it recognizes what you said. You have to speak your punctuation. The vocabulary is pretty big. I tried some words like paparazzi and broccoli which I can never remember. And my accuracy is better than what I type without looking. You're not supposed to look at the scream when you dictate, though. I think the main thing is that I get a break from typing when my right wrist is hurting. I can talk faster than type, so I'm a little scared to see if this can keep up with me. All these words, and only one typo which I'm leaving in because it's funny. Scream. I'm supposed to train it better on that word.
 
Dictating speech?

Hey,
Is it possible to dictate something and pages or any other app with write it down?
Regards,
Patrick
 
A google search or mroogle search will find some products or threads about this. There are programs that allow speech-to-text, but they tend to be touchy. You have to train them to your voice as well. There aren't any free apps to do it.
 
Pages

iPaddy said:
Hey,
Is it possible to dictate something and pages or any other app with write it down?
Regards,
Patrick
Click to expand...

I can do that with Dictate in Word, or wherever. I still use the mouse to click stuff.

by the way The ad at the bottom of this page has a 10% off discount code for MacSpeech Dictate, in my browser at least. This whole Google targeted advertising thing is creepy.
 
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