Sunday, August 01, 2010

An experiment with dictation software

Today I am using dictation software to write this next blog post. As of recently, I've been trying to improve my typing skills but so far have not come out with any major gains in typing speed and or accuracy. While reading on the Internet if have come across information about people whom write books using dictation software. I decide to give a program called Dragon Naturally Speaking a shot to see what it would be like to dictate a blog post instead of typing one. To be honest it feels very natural to speak and have a blog post written, however it does take some getting used to when it comes to dictating punctuation.

Another thing that would be useful is to have a good microphone with very little noise as it seems that I have some noise issues when it comes to having my speech converted into text, but I don't think this is a very significant problem as these mistakes can be very easily corrected through the keyboard. All in all I do believe that dictating these blog posts over microphone seem to be significantly faster than my typing speed as paragraphs can easily appear in large blocks as the computer processes through the speech and generates text.

So for the time being I went to give speech to text dictation a shot for my blog posts for now and see how that goes. It would also be an interesting experiment to try is to have a wireless microphone and be able to dictate while lying down in bed which it seems like something fun to do.

I live in a dorm room with one of the walls made of wood which unfortunately limits the volume of my voice at which I can speak, so I will be probably limiting so my blog posting to the early evenings until I move out somewhere where I can speak whenever I feel like; it is one of the unfortunate things about living in Japan but I have come to live with it.

So until next time.

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