Nuance Communications today announced the release of Dragon Dictate for Mac 2.0, a paid and rebranded upgrade for MacSpeech Dictate.

This is a major upgrade, bringing Dictate much closer to the Windows based Dragon NaturallySpeaking product. Major features include:

• Uses the same speech recognition engine as the new Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11
• Mouse movement with voice commands using a 3 by 3 grid system is now built in.
• Mouse clicking with voice commands including clicks with modifiers, double clicking, etc., is now built in.
• Proofreading documents with the Mac's built in text-to-speech commands is now also included.
• More than one microphone can now be attached to a single profile.
• New editing commands have been added so they match the commands that will be familiar to Windows Naturally Speaking users.

This sounds like it could now function as a complete keyboard replacement for disabled Mac users, which is great news!

Unfortunately my computer is still off being fixed (the first fix only worked for a few days), so I haven't had the chance to try this new version. As soon as is humanly possible, I will be getting myself a copy and testing it out. Meanwhile, Dan Cohen at GearDiary has reviewed Dragon Dictate and declares it 'awesome' - not a bad start!

Dragon Dictate for Mac costs US$199 including a basic microphone. The upgrade costs US$49 for a downloadable version, more if you need the upgrade on CD or want to purchase a new microphone at the same time.

If you use this banner to purchase your upgrade online I will get a small portion of your upgrade price, which will help support me and ATMac:

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Have you upgraded yet? Are you planning to upgrade soon, or later, or not at all? And what new feature are you most excited about?

- Ricky Buchanan

Speak It! is an application for iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad which lets you enter text via the regular keyboard and then speak the words via the built-in speaker, or save them to an audio file to email to others.

For users who need text-to-speech capabilities for their device, but don't need or want any interface other than the keyboard, Speak It! can be a very inexpensive AAC tool.

Text can be paused and resumed while it is speaking, and the generated audio can be saved to a file and emailed to others. Pre-typed text can also be saved to a "saved phrases" board and quickly selected to be spoken - the iPhone/iPod Touch interface has the saved phrases board on a separate screen due to space limitations, but the iPad implementation shows saved phrases and saved audio files down the left of the screen in landscape mode.

Speak It! comes with four built-in voices: a male and female voice with American and British accents. Other high quality voices including French, German, Italian, and Spanish voices, can be purchased from within the application for just US$0.99 each.

The Speak It! app costs US$1.99 from the iTunes App Store. It is localised in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

- Ricky Buchanan

Firefox generally doesn't let you use a lot of OS X's accessibility features, including the services menu and some of OS X's regular keyboard shortcuts. One effect of this is that really easy method for speaking the highlighted text when you press a key doesn't work.

The Firefox extension SpeakingFox fills this gap with some nifty context menu options which pass the currently highlighted text to OS X's default speech engine.

If you don't highlight any text, selecting "Start speaking text" will just speak the word currently under the cursor. As you'd expect, "Stop speaking" halts any speech currently going on.

This extension doesn't make Firefox into a fully accessible web browser for a blind person - for that you'll need to use an accessible browser, or a much more complicated extension such as FireVox. But for most of us who just need long sections spoken, and can highlight them with a mouse, SpeakingFox is just perfect.

- Ricky Buchanan

Voice4Me is one of the free programs available at the SchoolFreeware website. It's a very basic AAC program for users who have trouble speaking - users can click on a picture to speak the associated text, or type text into a box and then click on the 'speak' button.

There's a comprehensive introduction to this program available on the YouTube website, including configuration instructions:

[embed width="640" height="385"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcGindLKhMM[/embed]

The program is very limited in how much it can be configured - you must have both the picture and the text areas, and the number and size of the pictures can't be varied. The program also can't be controlled by keyboard alone if you want to access the pictures, so it's not usable with any combination of switches which is unfortunate. On the plus side it's free and once it's set up it's fairly easy to use. If you have no access to other AAC software this could be helpful.

Website: Voice4Me

- Ricky Buchanan

Did you know that you can change narrators automatically when you're using GhostReader? It's an undocumented feature, and only works with the voices from Infovox iVox or ConvenienceWare, but I've confirmed that it does work.

The biggest catch is that you can only switch between voices which are the same voice type and the same voice category. The voice type is either 'Infovox iVox' or 'ConvenienceWare', the ConvenienceWare voices can only be used within GhostReader whereas the iVox voices can be used with any programs. The voice categories are 'HD' and 'HQ' or 'HQM' (these two appear to be the same). To find out which voices are in which category, look on these pages:

• ConvenienceWare Voices lists the category and gender in brackets for each ConvenienceWare voice.
• Infovox iVox Voices does the same for the iVox voices.

We can see from this, for example, that the American English voices "Heather", "Laura", "Ryan", "Kenny", and "Nelly" are all HQ/HQM voices so we can swap between these.

To do the voice change, you put this command in your text:

\vce=speaker=newspeaker\

Instead of the word "newspeaker" you need to use the name of the voice you want, but the rest has to be exact - including the last backslash. So if you're using American English voices, try using this text:

\vce=speaker=heather\Are you coming along? \vce=speaker=ryan\Sure I am, I'd love to! \vce=speaker=laura\I will come along too.

It will start out with Heather, then switch to Ryan and then to Laura. If you have the British English voices, you could use this text instead instead:

\vce=speaker=Lucy\Are you coming along? \vce=speaker=Peter\Sure I am, I'd love to! \vce=speaker=Graham\I will come along too.

I only own the British English InfoVox iVox voices so I haven't tried to see if this works when switching between languages. If it does, it could be a really useful thing for when you have a document that changes from one language to another.

Remember, this is an undocumented command, and the speech synthesis system doesn't really "know" you've changed voices so it won't automatically change back to your default voice for more speech afterwards. For example, my default system voice is Peter, but after using the snippet above (which finishes with Graham speaking) any speech synthesis afterwards will still use the Graham voice. To fix this, add another switching command for your default system voice at the end of your document. So to switch back to my default Peter voice, the above text becomes this:

\vce=speaker=Lucy\Are you coming along? \vce=speaker=Peter\Sure I am, I'd love to! \vce=speaker=Graham\I will come along too.\vce=speaker=Peter\

It doesn't matter that there's no text after the last voice switch, it just tells the speech synth to switch back to Peter. So when my computer next announces the time, or I ask it to speak a block of text, it will be back to speaking in the Peter voice.

Can you think of any fun uses for this? Leave a comment!

- Ricky Buchanan