Andrew Ian Dodge is a 37 year old American expat living and working in London. He is a writer, author, novelist, blogger, political consultant  (his full time work) and the lyricist/frontman for Growing Old Disgracefully.
Website(s): www.andrewiandodge.com www.disgracefulmusic.com Profile: Andrew Ian Dodge on LinkedIn	He has been writing mythos stories for many years and has written an Idiots Guide to the Mythos.

Here are Andrew’s initial impressions of MacDictate along with some Screenshots of the User Interface

I have been asked to review MacDictate and use MacDictate to write my review . Now I bought MacDictate for my father but it is becoming rather useful for me as I am going through chemotherapy and have suffered from painful fingers. This affliction meant that I was unable to type anything longer than a sure I am chat. I was interested to see how easy it would be to use this sort of programme for someone who writes as much as I do.

I have been planning to buy MacDictate for my father who is not as good a typist and is rather sick of his hunt and pecking. I was surprised and pleased that MacDictate was so easy to set up. Now it might be rather unfair of me owing to the fact that I have both radio and podcasting experience. In fact I have been both behind and in front of the microphone many times. One learns very quickly to speak clearly if one is trying to get a point across on radio or television. It also may help that I have a so-called transatlantic accent which has a limited amount of regional dialect.

The package is quite an impressive one including a microphone headset and the software. The programme is rather easy to install and the training mechanism does not take too much effort to get right.

This does not need spending hours and hours training the software and you can get right to work fairly quickly.

My experience with such programmes goes back a few years and I’m impressed at the improvements made in MacDictate for the Macintosh with the Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition engine. Now I’ve only had it for a very few days and have yet to fully use all its varied abilities. However initial impressions bowled from installation and initial use a very good indeed. From these initial impressions I would recommend this to anyone in need of a decent piece of dictation software.

….

so there are some initial glimpses of MacDictate.  We hope to have some video capture of the program in action before too long.  We are also chasing down a story about video gamers using dictation to capture their moves, cheats, and conversations for publication when gaming on platforms such as the PS3 and XBox 360.

Page Popularity for Site: 12% [?]

The IQ Visual Mapping Conference is coming up this October 3rd in Morristown New Jersey. 

The conference will be hosted and led by Brian S. Friedlander, Ph.D. and his professional team of preeminent visual mappers who include: Adam Clayman, Stephanie Diamond, Chuck Frey, Arjen Ter Hoeve, Kyle McFarlin, and Wallace Tait. His assembled team comes from such areas as banking, psychology, manufacturing, business management, marketing and college teaching.
The conference will be held on the campus of the College of St. Elizabeth which is centrally located in Morristown, New Jersey, in close proximity to Newark Liberty International Airport and to Manhattan via New Jersey Transit.

Assistive Technology

I do not personally know if I will be attending or not as I have a slightly competing conference on the other side of the country the weekend before.  However, I would like to meet the speakers, several of whom I’ve known through various mindmapping communities for sometime, but never had the pleasure of meeting in person.

But as these things go, you can’t always make every conference that comes along.  If you are going, or thinking about it, please drop me a comment or an email.  If I can attend (time permitting) I will and don’t want to miss out on something good. 

Gathering together a large number of visual mapping gurus together in one hall has to be a powerful thing, who know what they might conceive, figure out, map out, plan, create, build or fix as a collective, could be finding a solution to oil prices, world hunger, time travel, or maybe something simple like the cheapest and fastest route to and from the airport in Morristown or maybe something kind of odd like charting out the path to creating weight loss pills that work or a list of foods that will increase longevity.

Its hard to say what will be in the ethos, but with so many people that have the ability to think and build together in a visual mapping context, there can’t be too much of a limit on their result.

Page Popularity for Site: 19% [?]

I learned a new thing about Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 when I transcribed multiple MP3 files into text this evening. 

I had 6 documents (recordings) that I needed to have transcribed.  I opened up Dragon Pad (the Word Pad like program that comes with Dragon Naturally Speaking).  I then used the Transcribe Recording program to select MP3 sound files of my voice one at a time and have them transcribed into text within the same document.

It was a slightly repetitive process as I do not have a batch transcription capability with my version of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.  (this may come with the mobile version, but I can not attest to that).

The interesting thing that I learned

After completing 6 transcriptions, with the text transcribed onto the same document, I was able to go back and select text from any of the 6 transcriptions and play back the voice file that went with the transcription. 

Plus, I could even correct that text to help train my computer for greater accuracy.

Finally, the original MP3 files did not have to remain on my computer.  I was able to play back the voice with the text, even after I had removed the original MP3 file from my computer.

The MP3 file was actually on my pocket recorder stored in flash.  I disconnected the card from the USB and could still play the file back.  This signified that the transcription process actually copied the sound file into or with the dragon pad document.

How Long does the Sound File stick with the Document?

The sound file and ability to listen to the voice with the play back function remained until I closed the document. I tried saving the document, closing the document and then re-opening the document in Dragon Pad.

Once it was reopened, I could no longer listen to the voice file that went with the transcribed text.

All in all I was impressed with this functionality as I tested it and learned some of the new boundaries.  Its not a deal maker or breaker for this software, but under certain circumstances it is useful to understand.  Its not so great that I’m going to call up my futures broker in the middle of the night and go long on Nuance stock or something.

However, if you ever run into a situation where your computer crashes and a document gets closed down prematurely, it would be my advice to simply run the original voice file through the transcription again and start over again if you need the ability to go back and compare the text to the original voice file.

Page Popularity for Site: 23% [?]

I have a Sony IC Recorder ICD-UX70.  It is not sold to work with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, but works just fine.  It cost me $100.  For $200 you can buy a Sony Recorder that comes with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 software, and I consider that a great bargain.

I bought my software, Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Preferred, over a year ago and bought the recorder later.  In total I spent $150 for the software and $100 for the recorder.  Total $250.

Since the Sony IC recorder doesn’t come made for DNS 9, I had to do some trial and error testing to figure out the best settings on my recorder for Automatic computer transcription.  (I recorded something on my sony recorder by speaking into it.  Then ran the mp3 file it generated through Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, which transcribed my voice into text.  You can see the results below for each of the recording quality settings on my Sony IC Recorder.

This is the original Text that I read aloud:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 9 is the most accurate speech recognition product Nuance has ever developed - delivering up to 99% accuracy! Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 9 is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals who want to work faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, on the job.

Here are 4 quick tips to duplicate my results or just get good results for every day voice transcription. 

1. If you run a file through transcription and it seems to get it dead wrong, or if the first few words are incorrect, try running the file from the beginning all over again.  Sometimes your machine just needs a fresh start at a transcription. 
2. Hold your MP3 recorder a couple inches to the side of your mouth.  I hold mine with my right hand to the right side of my mouth so that it doesn’t pick up my breathing too much.
3. Plus, when creating a voice file that should be transcribed, I try to allow 5 seconds of silence at the beginning of the recording to give my computer time to start the transcription process.
4. Set your microphone sensitivity to low

This is the Transcription results at 5 different quality settings. 

Note. I have not trained the software to work with my digital recorder.  I did not make any effort to correct the transcription.  If I had subsequent transcriptions would have substituted the word ‘nine’ for the number 9 for example.

ST - 192 kbps - Very Accurate, bit rate might consume too much memory, but fine if you will sync up file on rapid basis (37 seconds 887 kilobyte file size)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the most accurate speech recognition product nuances ever developed-delivering up to 99% accuracy!  Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals who want to work faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, on-the-job.

 

STSP - 128 kbps  - Very Accurate, Recommended, also good for Podcast quality (37 seconds 589 kb)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the most accurate speech recognition product nuance has ever developed-delivering up to 99% accuracy!  Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals who want to work faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, on the job.

STLP - 48 kbps - Decent and definitely workable (36 seconds 218 kb)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the most accurate recognition product new one is ever developed-delivering up to 99% accuracy!  Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals who once worked faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome on the job.

SP - 32 kbps - Not Optimal, but could be better (35 seconds 141 kb)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the most accurate beach recognition product and once is never developed-delivering up to 99% accuracy!  Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals want to work faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, on-the-job.

LP - 8 kbps - Not Recommended - Barely Functional (34 seconds 34.7 kb)

Him in an in him or over and and and and or allowing for which you will will work for your or should look to the work of the to him or her on.

Page Popularity for Site: 28% [?]

Today as I cranked up MindManager, I had a sudden angst of dread as I considered something that I needed to do with my MindManager mind maps.  I needed to find my mind maps on my computer, because MindManager doesn’t know how to do this simple function.  I hope Mindjet adds this functionality in MindManager Version 8.

When I use Windows media player from Microsoft or Picasa from Google, those programs are smart enough to go out and search my hard drive for all file types that can be used with them.  MindManager which is a software program that has a proprietary file type is not even smart enough to go find its own files that it creates.

That is a severe problem for users of the software that happened to store the files within sub folders other than the default file folder set up by MindManager, My Maps.  This means that you had to go find every folder that you stored a MindManager map within and link it manually into the program so they can then find your MindManager mindmaps and make them readily available for you within the MindManager program.

This is extremely tedious and time consuming and even worse if you happen to have a hard drive that’s a hundred or 200 or 500 GB in size and you’ve got multiple file folder structures.  I like to keep all of my files for a project together with in one folder instead of putting say the word documents for a project in one folder in the MindManager files for the same project in a different folder.  This makes it easy for me to find and organize files on my computer and it also makes it easy for me to share those files or folders with other users on ever need to either e-mail, file transfer, or upload them to a server somewhere.

But when I organize my files the way that I like to MindManager gets lost, and I tend to lose the maps I’ve created with MindManager.

My request for Mindjet working on version 8 of MindManager

So I have a simple request for the Mindjet team developing MindManager version 8.  Please build a simple little hard drive search engine that can search my computer and find all of my MindManager maps.  It should be too hard to utilize this type of search or index type of program.  They have been around for years and there’s lots of different companies and develop them for their own tools as well as generic tools. 

They are not as old as Roman Columns as technology goes but in the world of software they might as well be that old.  Even columns get an upgrade every now and then, ex. see fiberglass columns.

Page Popularity for Site: 28% [?]