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Open Speech Help - PlainTalk speech recognition appears as four software components. To install it, insert your Mac OS CD-ROM, launch Mac OS Install, and when you get to the Install Software screen, click the Customize button, select English Speech Recognition, and deselect everything else before continuing with the installation process. Yet, many users are unaware of this, because speech recognition isn't present by default - you must specify it explicitly when you do a system installation. Since then, all PowerPC Macs, and even some 68K machines, have been awaiting your spoken orders. After about a year of intensive work, Apple began demonstrating the fruits of its labors, code-named Casper, which became publicly available as PlainTalk in the AV Macs of 1993 it was then made standard in 1994 as part of System 7.1.2, with the emergence of the PowerPC-based Macs.
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What Day Is It? PlainTalk's first rumblings were felt in 1990, when speech recognition labs complained of a sudden "brain drain." Apple, sparing no expense, was hiring every researcher it could find.
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Apple mac speech recognition for free#
But if you only want to give your computer spoken commands, you probably can, right now, for free - with Apple's own system-level discrete speech recognition feature, PlainTalk. ViaVoice also does some discrete speech recognition, meaning you can say certain predefined commands to it, such as to select the next word, paste text, or turn off the microphone. In TidBITS-544, I wrote about continuous speech recognition on the Mac using IBM's ViaVoice, which enables you to dictate sentences and have the computer type them.