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Oh now that I didn't know...I'm going to play! Thanks for the tip.

EDIT: Wow...that was...underwhelming. Recognised only VERY occasionally. Dragon might be the way?

Strange, I've had pretty good experience with it (given that the vocabulary is limited to what's in the Speakable Items folder, it's been pretty forgiving for me). It does seem to be pretty hit or miss though (it'll work real well for some, not for others). Like OS X's handwriting recognition, the tech is likely pretty old.
 
Judging from the early reviews on the UK MAS im going to give this a wide berth
 

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Has anyone tried the Vlingo app in the app store? it's free and looks like it does the same thing to me.

I have the IOS version it is pretty good but the voice recognition is spotty

Right, but what about Siri three years from now after the processor has quadrupled in speed and Siri's database of words and phrases is many times more sophisticated? If they are clever, they have some back office program working on everything that currently stumps Siri. So as Siri gets used, it is also getting smarter. Since every request goes through Siri's server, they should have a code looking for things that people had to ask twice because Siri didn't work. That should be leading them to real world solutions for real world questions. This should be crowd sourced beta testing, basically. So Siri should be getting smarter very quickly. In fact, I bet you will find Siri noticeably smarter on the iPhone 4S just six months from now.
Agread. And love the part of your signature about your shares
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Got me excited for a second. $50? ******* that.

The full version is $300... the few features they chopped off aren't really that dire. $50 is a steal. Dragon software is leaps and bounds ahead of Siri. Siri is just a very glossy voice search with limited dictation. This isn't a product that's trying to be Siri... it's what Siri is built on.

Right, but what about Siri three years from now after the processor has quadrupled in speed and Siri's database of words and phrases is many times more sophisticated? If they are clever, they have some back office program working on everything that currently stumps Siri. So as Siri gets used, it is also getting smarter. Since every request goes through Siri's server, they should have a code looking for things that people had to ask twice because Siri didn't work. That should be leading them to real world solutions for real world questions. This should be crowd sourced beta testing, basically. So Siri should be getting smarter very quickly. In fact, I bet you will find Siri noticeably smarter on the iPhone 4S just six months from now.

Forget 3 years from now. Siri doesn't need much processing power or a large database of words.

What Siri says is one of the only things stored in your phone, but Siri is designed to piece things together from other words.

Say siri says to you, "There are five locations within two miles of your current location." Siri stitches her speech together from parts of a word database. Siri might not have a single one of those words in her database on the phone, but can speak them. This is her main processing need.

Aside from that, Siri will create an internal data base that knows Carol Jones is your mom, or Bob Smith is your boss. Mostly everything else is done in the cloud.

I can see Siri hitting the Mac and other Apple devices down the line, but I don't think we'll ever see the functionality of a Nuance product. They aren't going to license it that way for Apple, because it trenches on their bread and butter.

What Apple should do, if they were smart, is take some of those billions they're sitting on in cash, and buy Nuance. In the end, it would cost less than what they'd have to pay to be able to use their technology. Now, for controlling an Apple TV, or simple commands, a license would make more sense for Apple. You'd just never be dictating an entire word document with Siri, and that might be fine for them.

Personally, if they bought Nuance, it also puts them in a whole new software market. Siri fully baked with Nuance technology would be a good draw for people to come over to the Mac/IOS side of things, and they could still sell Nuance software to people on other platforms.


Has anyone tried the Vlingo app in the app store? it's free and looks like it does the same thing to me.

Eh, it's like saying why buy a a sports car with a V8 engine when a moped can still get you to the same place...
The performance pales in comparison. Nuance has the best speech recognition in the industry.
 
Given Siri's appearance in iOS5, I wouldn’t be surprised if we don't find something like this native in Mac OSX 10.8 if they sort out the licensing.

You would not be surprised, if it's not included in 10.8?
So you would be surprised if it was? As in: you don't think it'll be in 10.8?

You base that all on appearance?

don't be not surprised if i fail to don't get what you aren't saying.
 
Anyone having problems with Dragon Express?

I installed Dragon Express and couldn't get it to open on my admin account (Sandbox creation error: 1002. I have 2 HDs and symlinks, which may be the problem). If anyone has a solution, I'd be grateful because I did get it running on a vanilla account on the same MBP and the recognition is excellent. I did find the dictate panel would randomly close and paste the text into a google search, which was annoying.

I agree Apple could bring a really elegant solution to 10.8 but that could be a long wait for those interested in dictation now.
 
Dragon

For anyone who failed to launch Dragon Express on their main user I have successfully transferred some preference files from a dummy user to my admin user and got the application to launch. I am in fact dictating this using Dragon Express right now and its recognition seems to be faultless. (Well, 98% of the time it is faultless! Stay Classy, San Diego) If you are in the same situation here is what I did:

After opening and setting up Dragon Express in a second user account on my computer I copied across the following files and folders from the second account to my primary account:

~/Library/containers/com.dragon.express/Container.plist
~/Library/containers/com.gurl.service
~/Library/containers/com.logi.service
~/Library/containers/com.sevn.service

After this and having launched Dragon Express for the first time in my primary account I had to go through the setup procedure again. However, the software does seem to recognise speech well. The menu bar-based interface is somewhat quirky and commands such as the one that is supposed to send text to the open application does not seem to work. I'm sure the software will improve with future revisions.
 
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The price will increase once the initial offer is up. Not sure how much it usually goes for but i definitely wont buy once that does happen. Going to try and look for a You tube video of it running.
 
A really good friend of mine's dad was running some kind of siri on his laptop before ios5 came out, I was amazed, asked him about it and he told me he worked for nuance, I saw him last weekend and he said he could give me a free copy of dragon express, but nothing else seeing as it's under development :(
 
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