In 1990, Apple invested a lot of work and money in speech recognition technology, hiring many researchers in the field.
MacinTalk was developed by Joseph Katz and Mark Barton who later founded SoftVoice, Inc. which currently markets TTS engines for Windows, Linux and embedded platforms.
MacinTalk used direct access to the original Macintosh sound hardware and all attempts to license the source code by Apple to update it for newer Macs failed.
[3][4] Eventually, Apple released a supported speech synthesis system, called MacinTalk 2.
", "We must rejoice in this morbid voice" (a parody of Western church hymnody with organ music), or "The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of a fast approaching train".
[7][8] This prevented the clipboard from being overwritten, but also meant that, for applications that did not use the API, the feature would not function as expected, reading the title bar rather than the selected text.
Although available for all PowerPC Macintoshes and AV 68k machines (it was one of the few applications that made use of the DSP in the Centris 660AV and Quadra 840AV), it was not part of the default system install prior to Mac OS X, requiring the user to perform a custom OS installation to get speech recognition capabilities.
In Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and earlier, Apple's speech recognition was voice-command oriented only, i.e. not intended for dictation.
It can be configured to listen for commands when a hot key is pressed, after being addressed with an activation phrase such as "Computer", or "Macintosh", or without prompt.
This support was later removed, since it required too many resources and made recognition less reliable, only to be re-added in Mac OS X 10.3 as a "universal access technology" called spoken user interface.
In OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Apple added the option to download support for dictation without an Internet connection.
[citation needed] The first shipped inclusive with Macintosh LC and early Performa models, and was circular in appearance.
It was designed to sit in a holder attached to the side of a CRT display, and be lifted out and held by the mouth when talking.