MacSpeech Dictate 1.5.6
MacSpeech has released a maintenance update for the speech recognition utility MacSpeech Dictate. The latest version adds a Dictation Preferences pane that has the capability to enable or disable the Auto Cache Document feature for TextEdit and Microsoft Word. Other changes in recent updates include a contextual menu for the Available Commands window, proper display of Selection Commands in the Status window under the Recognized Text area, and disabling of Email Commands if Address Book contains more than about 900 entries to avoid resource issues. Also, menu mapping is now compatible with the latest versions of applications bundled with Snow Leopard, an issue that caused documents to crash when
caching or closing has been fixed, and a bug that caused crashes when editing with a mouse has been addressed. Full release notes are available on MacSpeech’s Web site. ($199 new, free update for purchases since 1 April 2009, $54.95 upgrade for earlier versions)
If you bought MacSpeech even 6 months ago the update is not free. It's $55 USD plus shipping.
You could buy a new hardware kit, etc, for $73 from Dealmac. http://dealmac.com/Mac-Speech-Dictate-for-73-6-s-h/319312.html
MacSpeech can't recognize from recordings, and has limited support for editing text from the keyboard.
Thanks for the heads-up. I looked into this some more and found that it's basically the same situation as when 1.5, which was a paid upgrade, came out. So, if you purchased MacSpeech Dictate after April 1st, 2009, you got a free upgrade to MacSpeech Dictate 1.5 back in May. As I understand it, 1.5.6 is essentially a free update for anyone who has 1.5 or an earlier version purchased after April 1st. If that's not true, I'll track it down with MacSpeech.
I've updated the article slightly to clarify.
This update has been totally unstable for me. I'm still trying to figure out the pattern for the random crashes. I'm suspected that it has to do with Word. I used the new setting to turn off Auto Cache for Word. The random crashes occur while Dictate is in Sleep Mode and I'm working in another app, often Word.
Same here, but I've not been using Word. Instead, while working in Quicken I've had Dictate 1.5.6 crash 4 times tonight while in sleep mode