You talk, it types-- and this time we're talking about your Mac. Well, maybe not your Mac, but at least some Macs. IBM's the first company to release a continuous-speech voice dictation product for the Mac, and it's about time. According to the company's press release, ViaVoice Millennium Edition 1.0 for Macintosh will be in stores "this week," in plenty of time for generous gift-buyers everywhere to snag a copy of the $90 software to give to their favorite Mac user. (Thanks to faithful viewer Steve Greenwood for the heads-up.)

Overall, the product looks pretty solid; the price is nice, the performance (based on the pre-release demos we've seen at Macworld Expos past) is decent, and the included headset microphone even comes with colored inserts so you can match them to your Mac. Sure, it looks like the Mac version may miss a few features found in the Windows equivalent, but over time, we bet that'll change. We have only a few concerns, really. The first is that there's no USB version of the product yet, as promised at the last Expo-- which means iBook users are left out in the cold for now. The second is the steepish system requirements. The press release says you need at least a 233 MHz PowerPC, Mac OS 8.5.1 or higher, 48 MB of RAM, 200 MB of disk space, a CD-ROM drive, and an audio-in jack "compatible with Andrea NC-71 microphones." Worse yet, IBM's ViaVoice for Mac page ups those requirements a bit, stating that you actually need a 266 MHz processor instead-- and in fact, you have to have an iMac, a Power Mac G3 or G4, or a PowerBook G3. Even worse, if you've got a Power Mac G3 or PowerBook G3 made before August of last year, apparently you're out of luck. That may leave a lot of Mac users out in the cold.

Our last concern isn't really a concern; it's more like a personal reason why we won't be producing AtAT using ViaVoice. Basically, we don't write in a linear fashion. Dictating requires the ability to plot out complete sentences in advance, and our scatterbrained approach often involves stopping in the middle of writing one sentence to change a word two paragraphs back. Random access writing's the best, and while we'd be tempted to use IBM's 30-day money-back guarantee to try out this cool new product, we doubt we'd end up using it for much. (There's also the little fact that not one of our many Macs actually meets the system requirements, but that's a whole other issue.) But those of you with actual attention spans and the ability to think in complete sentences, hey, go nuts.