I was just reading over at Family Matters, who in the great spirit of the blogosphere was nice enough to quote arstechnica.com, who reported from MacWorld that Apple is picking up the licensing engine for Dragon Naturally Speaking, throwing out iListen and pushing in Dragon Naturally Speaking into MacSpeech in a product called Dictate (in beta).

I came out of the fortune 500 corporate finance world powered by PC’s and the Mac was always some obscure piece of equipment that under funded*(or over funded depending on your perspective) art schools tended to use to get work done.  Over the last 2-3 years, that inbred corporate perspective has been changed as I started to do a great deal more work with graphics, video, audio and web design.

One of the things keeping me on the fence from making a final conversion or at least making an addition to my computer collection in the form of an Apple iBook or an Apple Air (odd name in that I want a computer with substance as opposed to a box filled with . . . .) is the absence of 2 tools.  One is a better version of MindManager for the Mac and the other is a great speech recognition program, preferably Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Here’s the quote from the articles I mentioned above:

ars technica reports from MacWorld:

As Nate noted on his staff journal this week, MacSpeech has now licensed the technology behind Dragon Naturally Speaking for its new product, MacSpeech Dictate (iListen is no more). MacSpeech claims that, with Nuance’s speech processing engine, Dictate is more accurate than iListen ever could be. We hit up the MacSpeech booth on the Macworld Expo floor to find out more about the software.

First off, Dictate is not shipping yet (contrary to conflicting reports on the Web). The software is still in beta, and we weren’t allowed to play with it directly—instead, we had to watch a demo. With Dictate, “training” the software to your voice only takes ten minutes, the company claims, which will then bring the software up to 95 percent accuracy. From there, it learns based on your speech. Like Dragon (read Nate’s review for more detail), there are a number of commands you can use to correct errors if they crop up, in addition to commands that can be used to open, close, switch, and otherwise control various Mac applications. If more than one person uses your Mac and wants to use Dictate, you can set up different profiles for each person’s voice—in addition to plain ol’ American English, Dictate is capable of understanding a number of accents, including (as our demo showed us) Australian English. [Read entire article.]

My wallet won’t be happy ($199 - includes headset) but my carpal tunnel can’t wait for the release. Stay tuned, I’ll be talking about this a lot more.

Family Matters » » MacSpeech Announces Dictate

*  My wife graduated from a great art school called the Savannah College of Art and Design.  I do believe that art schools can teach very useful knowledge, skills and abilities that society needs for many purposes. 

** On a complete side note if you want to find a great weekend getaway I highly endorse Savannah.  Break out your beach stuff, and pack up your travel gear and check out Savannah.  I highly recommend it in April when the flowers and trees are blooming and the beach is hot but not too hot.

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This might end up being the year that Apple managed to prove that they are just as capable of the poor execution of a media strategy as the next company.  They have been scrambling to deal with a public relations night mare, while attempting to clean up a financial scandal that dates back over half a decade.  The board seems to have been focused on saving Steve Jobs recognizing that Jobs is a key to their success and stock price.

However, its possible that historical actuals do not predict Apple’s future.  Steve Jobs put his name, reputation and possibly his job on the line at MacWorld when he announced the iPhone.  People had been expecting it, predicting it, savoring it, drueling at the mouth for it, and generally swarming like a mob to push Apple into a product and industry that they know little about.  So Jobs did something very atypical.  He followed the que and was allowed to be led into the murky world of vanishing profit margins sometimes known as the cell phone industry.

The fact that he followed as opposed to leading might have been mistake number one.

In the article, Why Apple shouldn’t have announced the iPhone by Karen Haslam, she describes how Apple seems to have failed to make sure the iPhone was ready for market by completing agreements with Cisco and receiving a little known thing in the wireless industry known as FCC Approval.  Thus, Apple essentially telegraphed its punch at MacWorld by telling the world what they would get in 6 months as opposed to delivering a knock out blow and taking the world by storm, like they did in 1984 with the mac and repeated in 2001 with the iPod and later the Nano.

Now, I have previously covered the problems with the iPhone in detail so I won’t redredge that dead horse.  That said its possible that the combined gaffes of telegraphing the punch, pushing a product out before it was ready and following the herd as opposed to leading the herd might be the first signal of the confidence that the markets have in Steve Jobs ability to the run Apple.

Many look at him like he is a golden child, but the world became disenfranchised with him in the late 80’s and they could do it again now.  Its possible that as Jobs ages, he may be losing the juice too.  Maybe instead of grilling Apple over the iPhone and the stock scandal, investors and the board should be grilling the company and Jobs over the lack of a viable succession plan.

The second to last time that Apple put in replacement to head the company, it was a disaster.

Technorati tags: Apple after jobs, flat footed macworld

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