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This VentureBeat offer offers the top voice recognition software out on the market – Dragon Dictate for Mac 3 — and for 50% off the regular price…just $100!

Now that Dictation is part of the latest Mac OS, you can do a lot more with voice-to-text. But you can’t exactly execute commands. At least not without an app like Dragon Dictate that can take dictation to a whole new level.

Here are just some of the features of Dragon Dictate 3:

• Ignite Productivity with Fast, Accurate Dictation: Say words and watch them appear on your computer screen — three times faster than typing — with up to 99% recognition accuracy right out of the box. Correcting or revising your dictated text is simple with a new, more powerful correction interface that lets you quickly edit words or phrases.
• Ignite Convenience Using Your Favorite Mac Applications: Dragon Dictate for Mac 3 goes beyond simple speech-to-text, and gives you control in more applications so that you can simply speak to do more than ever before. You can use it with virtually any Mac application, including Microsoft Word and Excel, TextEdit, Notepad, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and even Mail.app. Want to post to Facebook or Twitter by voice? You can do that.
• Ignite Proficiency and Ease of Use Right Out of the Box: Thanks to the new interactive tutorial’s simulations, you can learn and practice good dictation, correction and editing habits so that you can create text efficiently within just a few minutes.
• Ignite Freedom and Comfort at Your Mac: Say goodbye to repetitive stress injuries. Use your Mac in a comfortable, ergonomic way without being tied to your keyboard and mouse. Open applications or folders, select menu items, click or move the mouse, press keys, switch from one application to another or create custom voice commands to execute multiple steps by voice. Use your Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod touch (4th gen) or your compatible Android device as a wireless microphone over Wi-Fi for optimal convenience. Wideband Bluetooth support delivers outstanding wireless performance with no training required.
• Ignite Mobility for Productivity On the Go: Dictate into a Nuance-approved digital voice recorder or use the free Dragon Recorder app to capture high-quality audio files using your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch (4th gen). Dragon Dictate will transcribe the recorded audio files when you connect to your Mac. These mobile recording capabilities enable you to capture thoughts from anywhere, at any time while they’re still fresh in your mind to produce detailed, high-quality reports, papers, proposals, meeting minutes, and more.

The digital version of Dragon Dictate allows you to use your Mac’s built-in mic or an external mic to help you deliver demands to your Mac. (Please note: The digital version doesn’t include an external USB headset but the boxed version does. Click here to buy the boxed version – shipping will cost $9.95.)

Tell your computer to open your email and write an email and that’s what it will do. Need to draft up an email for work or write a paper for school? Don’t bother typing it because Dragon Dictate will help you get it done in lightning speed. Just read your text aloud and watch the magic appear before your eyes right on your computer screen.

You’ll get all of this with this great offer for just $100 – but you won’t be able to get it for long! Head over to the VB Store now and take dictation on the Mac to new heights today!

Since the year 2000, the sound scientists at audio chip firm Audience have tried to reproduce the way the human ear perceives sound. They turn that knowledge into computer models and create chips that process and reproduce sound so that you can hear it in your mobile phone calls.

Now the Mountain View, Calif.-based chip company is launching its first Smart Sound Processor that will deliver better voice quality on cell phone calls, improved speech recognition, and better audio playback in smart devices. The new chip is a codec, or audio encoder and decoder, dubbed the earSmart eS515 Smart Sound Processor, and it is debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today. The chip is the first in a family that focuses on high audio quality and low power consumption for mobile devices.

“This is the next generation in sound processing,” said Peter Santos (pictured right), in an interview with VentureBeat. “Our core technology is isolating voice or other sounds and then doing precise surgery on that data for the highest quality.”

Such chips are increasingly in demand for use inside mobile phones because the can make garbled voice calls more clear. That garbling is a problem as mobile networks become clogged and carry both voice and data at the same time, creating bottlenecks that put a lot of stress on mobile network providers such as AT&T.

Consumers want slimmer mobile devices with larger displays and more processing power. The Smart Sound Processor deals with this demand by tightly integrating technology that can reproduce and discern sounds for lower costs and less power consumption.

Santos said the Smart Sound Processor delivers simultaneous processing from three microphones, which enables more accurate sound detection and reproduction. It also handles automatic speech recognition, mobile audio zoom, and support for voice over the Internet.

Audience’s chips are already used in mobile devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note II, the Google Nexus 10 tablet, the Motorola Razr I, and the thinnest Android smartphone, the BBK Vivo X1. The company has shipped more than 200 million units and has more than 90 customers.

But the new chip’s features are better than what the company has produced to date. The three microphone inputs can gather more environmental information around a user and deliver vastly improved voice quality. The data can be used to discern the direction your voice is coming from as you speak into the phone. The chip can then filter out sounds that are coming from around you, like laughter at a party, the noise of cars on a street, or an airplane flying overhead. It can even remove echos that a mobile phone listener would normally hear in spaces such as conference rooms and hallways.

The speech recognition helps on the other side of a phone call, recognizing spoken words and filtering out disruptive background noise. The chip uses custom hardware-accelerated mathematical algorithms to isolate a voice from surrounding environmental noise, dramatically improving speech recognition applications such as virtual assistants and voice search. In other words, Apple’s Siri might actually understand what you’re saying with this new technology built into an iPhone. (Audience does not have a chip in the newest Apple phones, and Apple has an internal group of audio chip designers).

Santos said the new chip is also better at media recording and playback. It can capture audio with high-definition quality, with a technology called two-microphone 48 kilohertz noise suppression. And the Audio Zoom feature allows users to dynamically switch between narrate mode, with a single speaker, to interview mode, where the person holding the device can interview another person with crystal clear accuracy. In other words, it’s smart enough to discern two voices and make them sound clear, while filtering out background noise.

Audience was founded by Lloyd Watts, a researcher who worked with legendary brain and computer chip expert Carver Mead. Watts worked on audio technology at Paul Allen’s think tank, Interval Research, but that shut down in 2000. Allen’s Vulcan Ventures invested in Audience, and Mead joined Audience’s board for a time. The company got its first real capital in 2004 and started selling chips. Audience now has 290 employees, and it generated $40.3 million in its most recent quarter. The audio chips sell for about $1 each.

Audience competes in some respects with Jawbone, which makes a headset that takes additional information from the movement of your cheek muscles as you speak. But Santos said he believes his company’s solution is superior: ”We believe we have a commercial and technical lead,” he said.

The chip is available in samples now.

Even though Nuance’s technology is powering the speech recognition revolution across iOS and Android, the company hasn’t forgotten about its bread-and-butter software suite.

Today Nuance announced Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12, the latest entry in the long-running voice-recognition software series, which boasts 20 percent better accuracy than the previous version. Overall, the company says the new release has over 100 new features.

If you’re upgrading from an earlier version of Dragon, the accuracy benefits are even better: The company says the new version of the software is 35 percent more accurate than Dragon 10, 55 percent more accurate that Dragon 9, and 75 percent more accurate then Dragon 8 (which, to be fair, was released way back in 2004).

Unsurprisingly, performance is also dramatically improved. Not only will Dragon perform better on the same hardware as previous versions, it can also adapt to better hardware. If you have a computer with a quad core processor and 4 gigabytes of RAM, Dragon will automatically use the fastest speech model, according to Nuance’s senior manager of corporate communications, Erica Hill.

Having used earlier versions of Dragon in the past (and training plenty of users on it as well), I decided to give the new version a spin for writing much of this post. The setup process is still pretty much the same. The installation takes about 5 to 10 minutes, but you’ll have to spend 15 minutes or so training the dictation. While annoying, the training period is worth it — otherwise Dragon is nowhere near as accurate as it could be.

Based on my first impressions, Dragon 12 is definitely far more accurate than Dragon 10 from the get-go. After my initial training, Dragon rarely stumbled with complex words or expressions. Indeed, dictation feels more natural this time around (it helps that Nuance bundles a decent Plantronics headset in the box) — though editing text using your voice still remains a chore. You’ll still need to do a final editing pass on most text with a keyboard, but that will obviously be less necessary as you use Dragon and get used to its quirks.

While Dragon previously adapted to your speech mannerisms over time, the software is even smarter now thanks to a new feature called Smart Format Rules. Dragon 12 will keep track of your word, phrase, and format corrections, which should ultimately make its dictations indistinguishable from your own writing style.

Among other new features, Dragon 12 now supports Wideband Bluetooth audio, which will enable a 25 percent increase in accuracy for compatible wireless headsets. The software now also works better with Gmail and Hotmail on recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. Nuance has also released an Android version of its Dragon Remote Mic app, which lets you use your phone as a Dragon input on your computer.

Unfortunately, Dragon still looks pretty much the same as it did in 2005. Running the software on a Windows 7 machine feels jarring, since it’s using the same interface as it did back in the Windows XP days. Given just how much more ubiquitous speech recognition is becoming in mobile devices thanks to Nuance, I’m hoping the company steps it up with a more modern-looking Dragon for the next version. With the release of Mountain Lion yesterday, Apple has also made Nuance-powered dictation a standard part of its OS, which makes the need for a sophisticated voice dictation suite even less relevant (Dragon 12 is only available for PCs).

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 is available for pre-order now and will ship the week of August 13 starting at $99.99.

Photo via Shutterstock

Yes, BlackBerry too.

“We got our start on Blackberry,” iSpeech CEO and founder Heath Ahrens explains to VentureBeat. “We took the reverse approach. Rather than start with iPhone, work on Android, and perhaps do BlackBerry, we think all the platforms are equally as important, no matter what.”

iSpeech adds human quality text-to-speech (TTS, a term the company has trademarked) and speech recognition (ASR) to mobile apps. You can make your own demo with the free platform. iSpeech’s speech cloud has been used more than a billion times by 3,000 registered developers, according to the company. The iSpeech software developer kit (SDK) works almost exactly the same on all devices, important for apps like DailyHoroscope.

“Some of our BlackBerry users were complaining about font size,” says Max Binshtok, CEO of DailyHoroscope, in a phone interview with VentureBeat. “We fixed the font issue, but some people still don’t like reading on a small screen.”

Now they can listen to their horoscope. These daily fortune forecasts are quick reads, but it’s easy to see someone listening to them as they drive a car or take a break from listening to their iPod.

DailyHoroscope’s Binshtok says the quality of digital voice was the most important factor in deciding which platform to use. He says iSpeech sounds extremely human.

The speech industry is small and is dominated by speech recognition giant Nuance. Earlier in 2011 there were rumors voice control technology provided by Nuance would turn up in the next version of the iPhone, but new, elaborate voice features in iOS 5 were never announced during Apple’s June keynote. Apple has been radio silent on that front ever since.

A lack of competition has forced high prices in the speech technology industry. iSpeech CEO Ahrens says he likes the challenge of the current scenario.

“It’s better than there being 1,000 competitors,” he says in a phone interview. “This isn’t a ‘me too’ scenario. We’re trying to change the game in speech.”

App creators like Andre Gueziec, CEO of traffic reporting app Beat the Traffic, certainly appreciates a free platform. Beat the Traffic currently has 1.2 million downloads and hundreds of thousands of transactions per day. Gueziec says that while those numbers aren’t huge, the amount of time users spend with the app is.

“We have a lot of transactions and while we monetize, we don’t want to pay for every transaction,” Gueziec says. “It may work for Nuance but it’s not working for us. We don’t get paid per transaction. We get a lot of engagement from our audience and we are trying to drive innovations to improve customer experience.”

Beat the Traffic experimented with in-house efforts, but now exclusively uses iSpeech to support all of the app’s platforms. There will be a new version for iPhone in the fall.

iSpeech is currently working on celebrity voices. You can download President Obama’s or President Bush’s voice. The company won’t say whose voice they are currently working on, but my vote is for Captain Kirk.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google is taking a cue from desktop speech recognition software, like the popular Dragon Naturally Speaking program, by bringing personalized voice profiles to Android’s mobile Voice Search app.

So instead of the general speech models that Google has been relying on since it launched Voice Search two years ago, the app can now learn your voice and ultimately become more accurate.

By opting in to the app’s new “Personalized recognition” feature, Voice Search will begin to associate the voice commands you send it with your Google account. It will then use that data to build your personal profile. Google says that accuracy improvements will begin quickly and will increase the more you use the app.

Google was bound to do this eventually. With Android, it is pioneering the use of voice commands in many areas where you would normally use text. For example, you can dictate a text message on your Android phone with your voice, something that isn’t possible on the iPhone or other platforms (at least not natively). Building personalized voice profiles like professional speech recognition programs is simply the next step in improving its voice commands.

It’s ironic, in a way, that as our phones are getting smarter, we’re once again beginning to speak into them. As voice commands improve, I would wager most users would find them preferable to hunting and pecking on touchscreen keyboards.

The new Voice Search app is available on Android phones running version 2.2 of the OS or later. It’s unclear if Google will bring the feature to other platforms, or if it even technically can given the restrictions of other mobile platforms.