For a couple years now, I have been looking forward to the day when I could power MindManager with my voice.  I could think it, speak it, and it would be mapped!

A couple years back, I picked up on Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, then upgraded to version 10.  Neither version plays nice with MindManager 5, 6, 7, or 8!

Fortunately, a great little company has come up with a cheap solution to bridge that gap and the software is called VoxEnable.

Now, I sat down a week ago and created a series of videos showing how VoxEnable made it possible to use Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 with MindManager 8.  It worked beautifully.

Unfortunately, I had my video/audio recording settings cross wired, and the audio of my voice didn’t make it into the video.  Today, I finally got around to making those videos.  They are a little low tech as I created them on the airplane coming out here.   

That itself was a fun little experiment.  I wanted to see how the airplane sound quality might impact Dragon Naturally Speaking.  (End result, no impact at all, it worked great).

The first video is above, and I will have some more videos to follow this as I get a chance to publish them this week, so don’t forget to subscribe to our site if you haven’t already!

I have been using MindManager mindmapping software for several years now.  I am a trainer and love the program.  I do believe that it makes me more effective, more efficient and helps me keep information together in a way that might even make me smarter.

Those are all very useful traits to cultivate in yourself and for students, especially college students and high school students that is even more important.  This world is not getting any less crowded and students today have a great deal more competition than I had just a couple decades back.

That said buying MindManager as a student is a relatively inexpensive affair as Mindjet, the makers of MindManger offer some great educational discounts through partners such as Campus Tech.

Campus Tech Rates with the Educational Discount on MindManager Product Line

$150 is a great price for this software!  The rates for Mac users is very cheap as well.

Now there is one very cool thing about doing research with MindManager in a mindmap form.

It is very easy to recycle and reuse later.  I could definitely see a teenager and especially a college student keeping notes in MindManager and using those notes very effectively as they go to work as an intern or kick off their career. 

Imagine having a large chunk of your college education immediately at your finger tips!  Now, I do understand, one of the reasons for going to college and getting a degree is not only to learn a discipline, but to learn how to learn that discipline and stay on top of a changing landscape.

I was just reading over at Family Matters, who in the great spirit of the blogosphere was nice enough to quote arstechnica.com, who reported from MacWorld that Apple is picking up the licensing engine for Dragon Naturally Speaking, throwing out iListen and pushing in Dragon Naturally Speaking into MacSpeech in a product called Dictate (in beta).

I came out of the fortune 500 corporate finance world powered by PC’s and the Mac was always some obscure piece of equipment that under funded*(or over funded depending on your perspective) art schools tended to use to get work done.  Over the last 2-3 years, that inbred corporate perspective has been changed as I started to do a great deal more work with graphics, video, audio and web design.

One of the things keeping me on the fence from making a final conversion or at least making an addition to my computer collection in the form of an Apple iBook or an Apple Air (odd name in that I want a computer with substance as opposed to a box filled with . . . .) is the absence of 2 tools.  One is a better version of MindManager for the Mac and the other is a great speech recognition program, preferably Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Here’s the quote from the articles I mentioned above:

ars technica reports from MacWorld:

As Nate noted on his staff journal this week, MacSpeech has now licensed the technology behind Dragon Naturally Speaking for its new product, MacSpeech Dictate (iListen is no more). MacSpeech claims that, with Nuance’s speech processing engine, Dictate is more accurate than iListen ever could be. We hit up the MacSpeech booth on the Macworld Expo floor to find out more about the software.

First off, Dictate is not shipping yet (contrary to conflicting reports on the Web). The software is still in beta, and we weren’t allowed to play with it directly—instead, we had to watch a demo. With Dictate, “training” the software to your voice only takes ten minutes, the company claims, which will then bring the software up to 95 percent accuracy. From there, it learns based on your speech. Like Dragon (read Nate’s review for more detail), there are a number of commands you can use to correct errors if they crop up, in addition to commands that can be used to open, close, switch, and otherwise control various Mac applications. If more than one person uses your Mac and wants to use Dictate, you can set up different profiles for each person’s voice—in addition to plain ol’ American English, Dictate is capable of understanding a number of accents, including (as our demo showed us) Australian English. [Read entire article.]

My wallet won’t be happy ($199 – includes headset) but my carpal tunnel can’t wait for the release. Stay tuned, I’ll be talking about this a lot more.

Family Matters » » MacSpeech Announces Dictate

*  My wife graduated from a great art school called the Savannah College of Art and Design.  I do believe that art schools can teach very useful knowledge, skills and abilities that society needs for many purposes. 

** On a complete side note if you want to find a great weekend getaway I highly endorse Savannah.  Break out your beach stuff, and pack up your travel gear and check out Savannah.  I highly recommend it in April when the flowers and trees are blooming and the beach is hot but not too hot.