Why I buy this one ?
- Brings natural, continuous speech voice dictation to Mac OS X
- OS X/Aqua human interface look and feel
- Dictate, correct, edit, and format by voice text within SpeakPad
- Create customized voice commands in favorite Mac applications
- Noise-canceling USB headset microphone included

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What our customer's say!

"Works great...when it works", I originally used this product in it's OS9 version, then upgraded when it was available on OS10.1. Then upgraded again to V3. Once trained properly, I could count on very high accuracy, even with technical words I taught it to understand. I was doing medical reports with long scientific words, and though every once in a while it would have a "brain fart," but otherwise the program did a fine job. Fine until one day when... WHAM. The program crashed, and I could not recover anything of my training. Even though it has a "back-up" utility that supposedly saves all your user info, I could not restore it. Essentially, I had to start from scratch, after using it for several months. Well, I did all that, and I had it up and running again, and then WHAM. Everything lost again. And I was running a pretty fast G4 at the time (this was around 2 years ago). Now I understand Nuance is selling the program, but it's substantially the same. So I cannot recommend it if you're looking for a long term solution. Now I'm thinking... Windows XP runs well in Parallels on my Intel iMac -- maybe I should pick up a copy of Dragon!

"very poor, like most IBM softwre for consumers", a huge company like ibm is unable to produce a half way acceptable product for the masses. sad but true. actually, has ibm EVER produced a pc program that was ready for prime time? they sold DOS to gates and thus made him a millionaire and pretty well messed up with OS/2...reminds me of AT&T that are also unable to produce anything successful outside of their major line of business (telcom). anybodty remember the att&t line of computers, think theyt were called B1 or something???

the bad news is that the only other voice recognition software for the mac i know of, ilisten, is pretty bad also. best is dragon naturallyspeaking 9 for the pc.

"Don't buy this product", While the box claims this product is OS X compatible, we have not been able to even complete installation. Turns out it used to work with OS.X, and customer support in India sez they're working on a new version. yeah, right. IBM has nothing to do with it, they dumped it on another company.

"mediocre program, but better than nothing", Dragon, the leader in voice recognition software, never bothered to make a Mac version. IBM's Mac 10.3 ViaVoice is better than nothing, but not by much. As others have noted, it crashes every few minutes even on the best Mac hardware. I use it anyway because it has better recognition than I-Speak, the only alternative. Someday, someone will make a lot of money creating a decent voicetype program for the Mac, but this isn't it. In the meantime, IBM owes us a crashproofing patch for 10.3.

"Dying product", I find ViaVoice an important tools to save my arthritic fingers. Once trained, its dictation is reasonably accurate (even sorting out most homonyms), and the voice-directed correction (available only in SpeakPad) makes it useable. It learns as you correct it and can easily be taught specialized words in your business vocabulary or proper names.

Direct dictation into applications other than SpeakPad, such as MS Word or Safari, is less successful (interaction with Word's automatic formatting is particularly annoying) and not voice-correctable, so I only dictate to SpeakPad and then Copy&Paste to Word or the Browser. Using ViaVoice to control the Mac is messy, and I think you're better off using the Mac's Speech PrefPane to activate Speakable Items.

I started with ViaVoice Enhanced v2 under OS 9; and I was disappointed v3 for OS X couldn't import my OS9 voice model, meaning I had to train it all over again. Once trained and customized under OSX 10.1, it worked barely adequately on a 500MHz PPC Powerbook. Upgrading to a 1.25MHz eMac and adding a GB of RAM improved performance and recognition significantly, and I was happy with it until, starting with OS X 10.3 it became harder to make it work reliably. I've gotten it to work under 10.4.6, though it requires a bit of TLC (knock on wood.)

But, I must strongly advise readers not to jump into ViaViace now. IBM sold the product line (including the name "IBM ViaVoice") to Dragon Software, who have dumped it on Nuance. There hasn't been an update since OS X 10.2, and the Nuance website only lists 10.1-10.3 as supported OS. There's no sign ViaVoice for Mac will ever be upgraded; and now, with the arrival of Intel Macs, this is most likely a dead-end product.

I think you'd be better served considering iListen for Mac, or even using an Intel Mac to run both OS X and Windows and use Dragon Naturally Speaking on the latter instead.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Save your money!", I purchased ViaVoice for Mac Enhanced version and immediately had problems with it. Foolishly I upgraded to ViaVoice for Mac OS X, release 3, and thought the problems would be over. I was wrong. This software has very poor overall performance. It slows, hangs and freezes at the drop of a hat. There is no rhythme or reason to the freezes. I've tried stoping and restarting, reloading, various combinations, and it never seems to work properly. Being a Mac Addict since 1986 I think I know a thing or two about this system. It's not a user issue, it's a software issue!

"Wrong Product for panther", I can't get the microphone to even record. I think this version is incompatible with Panther, or I may have a faulty product. I am a very experienced Mac user and actually read manuals and web sites for support. It's possible that the correct product is actually IBM ViaVoice for Mac X USB, v. 3. It's a $30 upgrade from this version. Neither Scansoft nor Amazon makes this clear from looking at this page!

To give this product a fair review, it needs to be repesented correctly on this site as not being the latest version for Mac.

If I am wrong about this, I will correct it in a further review very soon.

"Has never worked well in OS X", Due to a spinal cord injury, my hands do not work. Obviously, typing is difficult, especially extended word processing. I use my computer 8-10 hours/day for work, email, etc., and frequently need to type more than a few lines. So, Viavoice seems to be the obvious choice for me. I have owned viavoice and each upgrade since the first version. Despite updates, this program has never worked well on OS X. On a few occasions I have gotten it to operate briefly, but usually it crashes, fails to open, does not respond, or dissappoints me in some other way.

Training the program is a long process, and the fact that I cannot use it now is ridiculous. I consider myself a mac expert, and use many programs. I have never been more frustrated with a program than I am with this one. Support is poor, and updaters are few-and don't help.

Save your money and more importantly your time-don't buy this program..