Customer Reviews

Ilisten with Headset Microphone 1.7 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I have used Dragon Naturally Speaking, and have had great sucess with it. Since I have a desktop Macintosh, I decided to try iListen to use with it. I spent over three hours training the software, and everything appeared to be going well. When I tried to use it with my G5 Mac, I have gotten nothing but garbage.

This program is worse than useless. Don't waste your money or your time on it.

Here is the above text dictated to iListen:

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Update:
After my first 9.5 days of waiting for support, I finally broke down and called the paid support telephone. I did get to speak to a really good support contact who waived paying for the support call as I couldn't get the app to open and it had been 9.5 days of no support for the issue.

This tech contact was great-- very knowledgeable, friendly and smart... he walked me thru all the potential problems using this speech recognition program and he lead me step by step to resolving the problem and to open and use the application... i.e. after a long support session he realized that the since I was running the ilisten app off a large 500GB home disk that the app was having trouble finding and properly setting up the profile file which kept the app from launching... so bottom line I have just started to use the app now and in this early stage I can say that the application has good potential for my usage ...i.e. to help me efficiently write a lot of content... if my experience with this app further

Original Review:
This application (both Version 1.71 and the V1.8 update) does not open on my G5 Power Mac with OSX 10.51 altho MacSpeech claims V1.8 is compatible with this OS and computer, so I have paid a lot of money for an app that doesn't easily work on my Mac. My biggest beef is the MacSpeech Support process and efforts... It has been over a week since I filed my first ticket thru a somewhat complicated support ticket process that is augmented with a knowledge base that seems very cryptic to my problems. In this week of waiting for a reply from the Support team, nothing has happened and my support ticket is still reported as not reviewed by the support team. I submitted a 2nd ticket with an update to my problem 2 days ago and still nothing has happened....

Mac Speech has a policy that if you want phone support you have to pay 15$ for 15 minutes and then 1$ per minute. This is not customer friendly for those of us who can't even get this app installed in a way that it opens...

I have given this a 2 star rating as I am still hoping that MacSpeech will help me at least find a way try to use this app... I will upgrade and change my rating if I get a positive outcome from the app and the company... If MacSpeech continues to stick it to me, I will further rate this app as 1 star along with the long list of other reviewers that have had bad experiences with this application and Mac Speech.

BOTTOM LINE: WATCH OUT! --- it seems like this company needs to go the extra mile to improve the customer experience on what some folks report is a good application. Hopefully the company will improve their support process or they will face more negative customer reviews, legal consequences and market pressures.

I stopped using iListen after a few weeks because it was just too hard to make it work accurately. I get the sense that if I put in more time to correcting mistakes that it made or reading to it more to improve it's accuracy, I would like the results better. But, it processed words so slowly on my 867 mhz laptop that I found it easier to type.

The negative reviews on this site, and other sites, strike me as accurate. This product is a waste of money. It is so difficult to learn how to use it that the makers have had to create a long DVD to train users. Even after watching that DVD (which they make you pay for) and spending long frustrating hours reading stories and correcting my texts (using their clunky verbal correction system) I have still only been able to achieve an accuracy rate of about 50%. I think you would have to spend days training this program and fiddling to make it worth your money. Buyer beware!

I bought iListen 1.7 for Mac OS X and it has been completely useless. Not only have I not been able to get it to work, I paid a tech service almost as much as the software costs to help me get it working. They couldn't do it either. I resorted to paying for tech support because iListen tech support is only online and useless as well. They send multi-page emails with detailed actions, most of which I'd already taken, and they make excuses such as that voice recognition software is highly complex technology. They suggested that I buy another usb connector because iListen apparently doesn't work with the more recent versions of Mac OS X. I note that there is no mention of that in their ads. I bought the usb connector for the Plantronics mike because I didn't want to downgrade my OS. Again, it was useless. Even recording myself counting produces gibberish, and I have done professional voiceovers for training films, so I know my voice records well. What a waste of money!

I am the disappointed one who equated iListen with my ex-wife.

MacSpeech helped me arrange a second marriage with their new produce, DICTATE.
In brief, I am wowed and amazed. It gets complex technical psychiatric terms and phrases. I find myself challenging it as though I am a host on a game show and it is going after a million bucks. Aside from a few forgivable limitations, such as spelling numbers, I am in love.

I have been a dictat-or for 30 years, and have gone through my share of humans and programs (ViaVoice is on my dusty shelf too). My office manager is sick and tired of hearing me complain.

No more! This DICTATE product is beyond my expectations, and i remove the hex from MacSpeech that I placed in my review of iListen. The equipment they compelled me to buy works great (the Platonics headset) and I am gong to try the Olympus D-2 next, even though there is no instruction for a digital recorder input, I am confident that hooking it up to the line-in will go well. I will let you know. But even if it doesn't work, I am glad to help this company feel the joy of profitable victory after their failure of their hyped but fatally flawed iDon'tListen first attempt. And that is from a doctor who dictates 25 pages a week, and has no vested interest in this company.

PS, YouTube has some examples of its performance by another awed early user.

I tried the IBM software many years ago and experienced much pain. I had the same experience today with iListen. If I dictated beyond the grave, this program wouldn't work. The results were so bad, I immediately understood there was no hope. It's so bad, there was no place to start from. I trained it for a couple of hours. It said everything was great. Then I tried to dictate an email. The results were undecipherable garbage. And any attempt to correct it yielded worse garbage. The hope has not been realized. In fact, the hope is not even within a hope of being realized.

After purchasing the software version 7, I downloaded the upgrade to version 8. No documentation came in the box, one must also download a PDF from their website. Documentation for the latest version was NOT available from their website. After exhaustive hours of training the software with no results, I emailed the company asking for more specific instructions for recognizing WAV files. Over a month later, I still haven't received a response. I found this product to be completely useless.

I think this program gets a bad rap. If you speak clearly in a quiet room, you can achieve very good accuracy. The trick - in addition to having the microphone properly positioned - is to not speak with much inflection in your voice. If you speak to the computer in the same way you speak to your friends, it will not work. However, if you speak like Mr. Spock from Star Trek -- calmly and logically -- it works fairly well. :-)

That said, the program is, on the whole, a frustrating experience. As careful as you are to speak clearly, the program is going to get a lot of things wrong. The documentation says that in order to get the best accuracy, you should speak your sentences fully and completely, rather than word for word, because this software uses contextual clues to figure out which words you were speaking. The problem with this approach is that it is too easy to get comfortable with your stream-of-consciousness approach, and in the process, fail to see many errors and misspellings that have cropped up.

The program works, but it is important to be vigilant and keep an eye on what exactly is being transcribed. The program works best if you are prepared to constantly correct its mistakes. This is a frustrating experience, yes, but as bad as the speech recognition sometimes is, it can be very useful in getting words on the screen -- and simply STARTING, often times, is the hardest thing to do. So in that respect it is helpful.

The most frustrating aspect of the program is not the frequent misspellings, but rather the lack of vocabulary. Many times, the program heard me just fine, but did not have the word I was using in its dictionary. And I do not use extravagant words. So it took a lot of time to manually add words that already should have been there.

That said, I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the new program from MacSpeech, "Dictate," which won "Best of Show" at the most recent Macworld Expo. It is supposed to have the accuracy of Dragon's Naturally Speaking, because it uses the same speech recognition engine.

It is time to come clean: I used iListen to construct this review. Yes, I had to correct words in almost every sentence. But there is no way my review would have been as detailed had I attempted to type it. That is where iListen's strength lies -- quickly getting a large amount of text onto the screen so that you can work with it.

I got iListen to help my son with a learning disability speed up his writing. The system seems to be unable to understand his 10-year old voice. I'm going to try training it again but he's pretty tired of reading (not his strong suit) aloud into the microphone over and over.