Whither Speech Recognition? That's the question many Mac users (especially those of us with one hand in a cast) are asking today. While we've been able to run scripts and control the Finder via voice commands for several years now, that capability hasn't improved except with the advent of faster processors; the underlying technology in the system software is essentially unchanged. And if you actually want to dictate into your Mac, you've got to buy an expensive third-party software package.

So it's encouraging to read at Mac OS Rumors that Apple is reportedly working with Dragon Systems (one of the pioneers in speech recognition technology, and the publisher of the only dictation software available for the Mac) on the next generation of Plaintalk. Or rather, they're close to working together; Apple must first resolve a patent dispute with another company before it can work on improving its speech recognition software. That dispute is apparently close to resolution in Aplle's favor, so hopefully we'll see some serious advances in Plaintalk in the not-to-distant future.

By the way, this is the first time in four years of Mac use that we've encountered a situation in which the lack of a certain kind of productivity software may have made us less productive. Following hand surgery, being able to dictate instead of having to type one-handed could have made a big impact on AtAT's schedule. There's a ton of natural speech recognition dictation software available on the PC side that's well within the AtAT budget constraints, but the only dictation software available for the Mac, Power Secretary, is much more expensive and (we're told) not terribly effective. On the other hand, Easy Access' Sticky Keys has helped tremendously, and AtAT's production relies heavily on BBEdit, Applescript, interapplication drag and drop, and other Mac mainstays, without which we'd be lost. We just wish we could throw a decent dictation package into the mix as well.

Hands up, who uses Word 98? Well, if you're waving your paw in the air right about now, we appreciate your enthusiam, but we can't see you, so you can go ahead and put your hand down now. Better yet, use that hand to channel-surf over to MacFixit, who reports on a very strange bug in the software that is potentially a major security problem.

It seems that whenever you create a document in Word 98 and save it, the contents of documents in open windows of other running applications may be captured invisibly in the file format of the saved document. Opening the Word 98 document in BBEdit reveals the hidden text. (This isn't necessarily a strange thing to do-- we open Word 5.1 documents in BBEdit all the time, because all the text is readable, even though the style formatting goes away.) And apparently the bug isn't even limited to data in open applications-- reportedly, data from closed documents stored on the hard disk can also show up embedded in the file. So when you give the Word 98 file containing the Peterson proposal to your boss, it just might contain the nasty comments you made about him in that email message to Lenny in Accounting-- albeit in hidden form. (Of course, if you're sending unencrypted company email disparaging your boss, you're pretty much asking to get caught anyway...) Now, while this problem is apparently not only a Word problem-- several applications may forget to zero out unused memory space-- we would have thought that Microsoft has been doing this programming thing long enough to avoid that kind of sloppiness.

Wow, first there was that little "accidentally delete your whole System Folder when trying to uninstall Office 98" thing, and now this. We guess it just wouldn't be Microsoft software without at least a few huge, glaring bugs capable of trashing your important data or making it available to others without your say-so. We're sure Microsoft will release a bug fix for this problem soon. In the meantime, we'll be examining all the Word 98 documents we come across in hopes of finding something entertaining and/or incriminating. Wheee!