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I am also a fan of voice recognition systems, which as has been pointed out have improved tremendously over the years. The version that was originally used by Mac users was an IBM product which was almost unusable. However, last year an independent company called MacSpeech licensed the Dragon Nuance platform that has been so successful with PCs. MacSpeech is continuing to roll out additional features for its product, and should soon be as versatile as the Dragon products. One interesting point that I picked up in a MacSpeech newsletter has direct application to people whose voices tend to fluctuate between the mumbling, damaged speech that we recognize as particularly Parkinsonian, and a more clear and articulate and forceful speech when our medication is working properly etc. MacSpeech advised that users can create more than one profile, so that you can have a profile which reflects your speech when you are speaking relatively clearly, and another profile for when your voice is mushy and indistinct. They even advised that for people who work in cubicles in an office where the use of the voice recognition system might bother other persons as you chatter away, you can create a "whisper" profile in which you can actually whisper your dictation and the voice recognition system will recognize it as a separate profile that you can use as needed to avoid bothering coworkers or others in your home. I also have been using Dragon, and now MacSpeech, for about 10 years and I don't know how I would get along without it. It is morning, my voice is halfway between mushy and crisp, and the system is working just fine and produces copy much faster than I could by typing even before I was diagnosed. One last thing. It has always surprised me that so few people seem to be willing to take the time to train the system to recognize and accurately reproduce speech as copy. Well, for those of you who have put off learning to use voice recognition and still laboriously try to type when your fingers don't want to cooperate, MacSpeech (and I assume Dragon) has installed a better engine for voice recognition which cuts the training time down to about 10 minutes and simultaneously greatly increases the accuracy of the system. So do yourself a favor and open up a world of communication that you may have thought had been lost to your Parkinson's disease. Best, Greg (Dictated and corrected in 10 minutes using MacSpeech) ________________________________ From: Kathleen Cochran <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2009 5:03:08 AM Subject: Re: voice recognition software Yes! I use Macspeech Dictate and it works very well. Worth every cent. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn