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MacSpeech Knowledge Base
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Article #: KB18

Summary:
"Using Digital Recorders with iListen"

Details:
Note: iListen support is discontinued. This information has been archived for historical reference.

The following digital recorders [were] compatible with iListen:

  • Olympus DS-2
  • Olympus DS-20
  • Olympus DS-330
  • Olympus DS-2000 series (including the DS-2300)
  • Olympus DS-3000 series
  • Olympus DS-4000

Video iPods, iPod Classics, and 2nd or 3rd generation iPod Nanos [were also compatible] for use, as long as one of the following microphone attachments is also used:

NOTE: It is also possible to use the DM-1, DM-10, or DM-20 Olympus digital recorders with iListen, but we do not recommend and cannot support them due to lower accuracy and a more difficult set up procedure.

If the recorder you have is not listed above, then we are not able to support its use with iListen. This does not mean the recorder will not work with iListen at all. It means that if you can't figure out how to get the files from your recorder to your Mac in a format iListen would be able to use, we would be unable to help you. We [were only able to] provide support for Olympus recorders whose model numbers start with "DS."  We cannot provide support for Olympus recorders whose model numbers start with VN, VS, WM, WS or any other brand of recorder.

All speech recognition programs (both Macintosh-based and Windows-based) which support transcription from an audio file have the following limitations:

  1. There must be only one voice in the audio file. Speech recognition software treats audio files as data. They can't tell when different people are speaking.

  2. There must be a matching voice profile for the person speaking in the recording. Without a matching voice profile the software has no references to compare the incoming audio information against.

  3. The person speaking must also speak punctuation such as commas, periods, question marks, et cetera. Spoken punctuation is necessary to provide additional context for the words.

  4. You must use a digital voice recorder. Tape-based recorders have tape hiss, which causes too much distortion.

  5. You must have the MacSpeech TranscriptionPak installed (version 1.7 and later).

All these criteria must be met in order to achieve the best recognition accuracy. iListen has specific requirements as to audio file format as well. The audio file must be in either AIFF or WAV format with the following characteristics:

  • 16-bit mono
  • uncompressed
  • a sampling frequency of 16KHz.

The support for transcription from audio files [was] designed solely to allow an individual to dictate text while away from the computer and have this dictation transcribed at a later date.

For instructions on how to use these recorders see the following articles:

DS-330

DS-2000, DM-1, DS-3000, and DS-4000