He tries to compose via dictation
I have always been interested in voice recognition software. In fact about 10 years ago I tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking that whatever version it was back then; but my 350 MHz Pentium II PC just wasn’t fast enough or powerful enough to be accurate.
Recently, however, I see that the reviews of the latest Dragon NaturallySpeaking are raves. So, since my laptop is a lot more powerful, I got version 9 of the software. I tried it, and it still wasn’t good enough. But later on, while I was playing with the laptop, I begin to suspect that having the laptop on a low power setting was probably not giving me enough juice to enable the program to recognize my speech. (Also, I must admit, I am a terrible speaker, and my voice is very soft and breathy; not the best combination for a computer to recognize and accurately dictate speech.)
So, here I am. Yesterday I installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking again, and committed myself to trying it. Yesterday was my first blog post using the voice dictation. I’m not very proud of what happened – mostly because I found it very difficult to compose my thoughts while speaking aloud and then checking how accurate voice recognition software would work. The software worked very well. The big problem, however, was my own composition.
It turns out that the way you compose something influences what you compose.
That should not have been any surprise – after all, I noticed the difference between composing in longhand and on a keyboard several months ago. So why shouldn’t it be an even greater leap, and an even more fundamental change, to compose while speaking aloud? Of course it should be.
This post also I am composing using the voice recognition software. I think I’m getting more used to it – all the same, I know it will be a big adjustment to make. But any tale you mean to be heard and listened to is probably better composed by speaking it out aloud – composing it on the keyboard or even in longhand, and then reading what you have written out aloud, still has for its ultimate basis words that have been written silently.
Well we shall just have to try this out – and you can judge me for yourself.
(Composed via dictation on Sunday 31 August 2008.)
