Remember way back in the days of the Quadra AV series and the very first Power Macs, it seemed like Apple was blazing the trail in the field of computer voice recognition? Those Macs supported PlainTalk, a cool technology that would allow you to speak commands to the Finder, like "empty the trash" or "put this in the Apple menu." The speech recognition module came with several "speakable items," and you could make your own by putting together simple Applescripts. It was both occasionally useful and a seriously cool "gee-whiz" feature that never failed to impress people. But ever since PlainTalk showed up, speech recognition on the Mac has pretty much stayed still while all kinds of advances were made on the Wintel side. Most importantly, while PlainTalk lets you issue commands to your Mac, it doesn't let you dictate text. For that, the only real choice is PowerSecretary-- now discontinued-- which was hideously overpriced for a long time, because it was the only game in town. And even though it's priced a little more reasonably these days, it still uses an old speech engine that requires the user to pause unnaturally between words. Meanwhile, there are a ton of "continuous speech" packages available for Wintels that allow dictation under relatively normal speaking conditions.

So one of our Christmas wishes for our poor, aching wrists this year is for a decent and reasonably-priced continuous speech dictation product for the Mac. Apple has been rumored to be working on some kick-butt speech technologies in secret, which may be one reason that other vendors don't want to take a chance on it right now. However, MacInTouch notes that Apple's been engaged in lawsuits with the makers of PowerSecretary and some other speech products since 1996, and that may account for the relative stasis in Apple's efforts. The only other real hope for Mac dictation out there right now is MacSpeech, a company who is fighting the Mac market share current and trying to raise funds to complete their own continuous dictation product. We salute their intestinal fortitude, and we'd like to mention that one of the ways they are raising funds is by selling "Founder's T-Shirts," which cost $99 but will grant the owner a $79 discount on the product when it ships-- and wholesale pricing on two future releases. If you're chomping at the bit for dictation software for your Mac, consider investing in a Founder's T-Shirt this holiday season.

In the meantime, though, for those of you who have never messed around with PlainTalk's speech recognition capabilities, we recommend that you give it a try. In our opinion, it's not necessarily terribly useful-- but it's a lot of fun. Being able to come home from work and say "Honey, I'm home!" to trigger a connection to your ISP, the downloading of your new email, the launching of your "browser of choice," and the loading of your favorite daily web page (which, of course, would be this one, right?) is a real hoot. If you want to get really nuts, you can even hook up your Mac to your household appliances via X10 interfaces and have it brew you fresh coffee in the morning when you yell out, "Mondays suck!" It's just one more way that your Mac can feel less like just a computer and more like a friend. (For those of you with iMacs, PlainTalk isn't officially iMac-compatible yet-- but a Christmas hack from MacSpeech works as a temporary patch until Apple releases its next version of PlainTalk next year.)