Tech Tuesday: Mac Dictate

Welcome to the first edition of Tech Tuesday.  Tech Tuesday is where we review a piece of technology - gear, software, gadgetry in general - and see how it fits into our lives as photographers.  Being a web designer for years before I got serious about photography, and before that, a *gulp* tech guy, technology is generally somewhere mixed in my thoughts when it comes to photography and how we can more easily do what we do.

So thats tech tuesday in a nutshell.

This week we have Matt Brandon giving us a quick review of a piece of software he uses quite regularly called Mac Dictate. Mac Dictate is produced by Mac Speech and the purpose of the software is to, as they say "...forget about what you are typing, and focus on what you have to say."  I've always been skeptical of speech recognition software, mostly because I find that it turns out to be more hassle than it was worth and usually not free on top of that.  Nonetheless, I'm incredibly impressed by Mac Dictate and equivalently intrigued by how integrated it is into Matt's workflow.

Matt wanted me to point out that he used Mac Dictate to answer these questions - He made zero corrections and to be honest, he didn't even proofread it when he sent it to me. Matt's by no means lazy and I'm by no means that bad of an editor, he just wanted you guys to get a feel for how accurate and inteligent the software actually is and what better way than to put your money where your mouth is (I'm avoiding an obvious pun here).  There are mistakes but for the most part its way more impressive than I would have imagined.  Check out some example videos here and here.

Undoubtedly a piece of technolgy that could prove useful for photographers.  Check out the interview after the break.