This article focuses on technology that is far, far beyond the scope of what Apple’s offerings can achieve.Īfter being impressed by all of these things David Pogue was doing, I decided to do some research myself. That’s why you probably used it for about the first day after you bought your Mac, and then ignored it from that point forward. Additionally, he was using the dictation technology to control the Mac itself.īefore we get started, let me first get the following out of the way: Apple does have a speech recognition technology now included with Mac OS X, but it is incredibly limited and inaccurate in practice. This enabled him to go through hundreds of e-mails a day in a small fraction of the time it would have taken him to type them. For example, he would say, “Thank You,” and his Mac would write an entire letter explaining how grateful he was to a reader for taking the time to write to him, and how much he valued their response. When combined with text expansion as seen in TextExpander, the technology really starts to take off. This is absolutely awe-inspiring to see in practice. What he demonstrated was that a well calibrated speech recognition system can recognize nearly anything that comes out of your mouth, in real-time. He also demonstrated that he was using this same technology to write nearly all of his e-mails, and to greatly increase his productivity while using his Mac. Pogue demonstrated that he was using speech recognition technology on his Mac to write nearly all the articles for his New York Times column.

Recently, I watched a video from TED of David Pogue talking about technology and how people who use technology on a day-to-day basis tend to find faster and more efficient ways to use the technology than their “average person” counterparts. However, the companies that decide which technologies get produced have decided not to use speech recognition as a primary means of input, but to use the keyboard and mouse instead.

The ridiculous part of all this is that we have had the technology for speech recognition for nearly three decades. Because of this, if you care about productivity at all, the future of speech recognition technology should really matter to you. If you speak clearly and quickly, you can talk your computer far, far faster than you could ever possibly type. Why then, do we depend on keyboards and mice to interact with our computers? When I saw “Jarvis” in Ironman, I saw the very real potential that speech recognition software has to revolutionize the way we interact with technology. We humans don’t communicate with each other using keyboards. From the very first time I saw the first Ironman movie, I was really inspired by the potential for speech recognition software.

Dragon speak for mac