Breaking Windows
And when it does, Virginia Beach, Va.-based Vianix will be there. The company’s Managed Audio Sound Compression (MASC) offering compresses audio files for easier storage and transfer. MASC reduces the size of voice files by 10 to 20 times and delivers them with up to 300 percent faster processing speeds, similar to the way that programs like WinZip compress data files. "We will play big in the mobile space, especially on smartphones," says Bernard Brafman, vice president of sales and marketing at Vianix.
Brafman notes that interest for MASC has steadily been building among dictation software providers, mobile service providers, and mobile equipment manufacturers. Nuance already provides MASC technology in its Dictaphone dictation products. Dolbey, a maker of medical dictation and transcription products, has included MASC in its FusionMobile product since its launch in May 2006 to respond to a growing demand among the medical community for dictation software that could run on PDAs.
That mobility is key to Apptec’s DigiTel system, according to Braverman. "It gives users flexibility that wasn’t there before," he says. "Dictation was tied into a desktop computer at the office. Now, you can move it from one machine to another."
But not everyone is convinced that mobile dictation is a good idea. McKesson’s Rose says his company has no interest in the mobile market and calls it a "very-well-founded truth that in information-rich environments, things very much correlate with screen space.
"To put dictation on such a small screen, it becomes unreadable," he states. "Most users would be better served with a large screen so they can see a lot of information without a lot of effort."
MacSpeech has also avoided the mobile market, but for a much different reason. "If we did something with mobile, more than likely it would be around an Apple product like the iPhone," Taylor explains. "But for now we’re focused on [the Mac] desktop."
But regardless of where he uses Dictate, Fletcher is relieved to finally have some options without having to dump his Mac. "As a user, I’m glad. For me, anything brings a far better experience."
—Additional reporting by Lauren Shopp
Macs on a Roll
Chalk it up to a halo effect from Apple’s success with its iPod and iPhone, great marketing, the ubiquity of its TV commercials, or a general sense of disappointment with Microsoft’s Windows Vista PC operating system, but sales of Mac computers have been exploding since late last year. Apple moved 2.3 million Macs in the last three months of 2007, raising its share of the total global computer market to 6.1 percent, according to research from Gartner. In the first quarter of this year, it sold another 2.9 million units. With sales like that, some industry watchdogs expect that Apple’s share of the computer market will rise to 21 percent in the U.S. and 10 percent globally by the end of the year.
The Mac resurgence—after several years of just barely holding on to a paltry 2 percent to 3 percent of the total computer market—has prompted many to anticipate a software revolution as more Mac sales lead to more software for the Mac, which will lead to more Mac sales, which will lead to even more software, and so on.
As the first sign of that, Loquendo TTS, for example, is now available for developers of multimedia applications on the Mac OS X operating system (versions 10.4 and later). —L.K.