A Question for Tim

Is this a new form of film?

I have a friend who’s a genius. He’s one of the most brilliant men I know, and an expert animator and cartoonist. He is the original ‘naked rabbit’ at http://www.nakedrabbit.com. He also teaches film, and is an all-around underground genius. So, when I have a question about a new form of filmmaking, animation, or cartooning, I always ask him first.

Long ago, it occurred to me that filmmaking students could very cheaply make rough drafts of their films by building the soundtrack on a cassette tape, and then shooting still photographs of whatever scenes they wanted to do. They would then make slides out of the photographs and project those slides in synchronization with the soundtrack playing on the cassette. The sync wouldn’t be exact – it would be pretty rough as a matter of fact – but it would be serviceable and it would give the filmmaker and his colleagues a pretty good idea of how well the film would work if they made it into a full live-action film.

Tim has the urge to make a feature film on his own, something he’s been talking about for a long time, and he has tons of ideas for scripts. What he lacks is the money, the huge amounts necessary to make a feature length film.

Now, I’m thinking to myself, ‘What about marrying my old idea with Tim’s desire to make a feature?’ The idea is simple: first, write the script. Second, cast the roles. Third, perform the scenes. Fourth, choose edit your takes, and build up a rough draft of the film as a radio play. Smooth out the timing, edit and re-edit the takes, and add in and sound effects and music. What you have then is a radio play version of your movie.

This radio play version should stand on its own, so that all the necessary information is included within it, and the audience listening to it, will have the full range of emotional involvement and reaction.

The radio play version will also serve as a podcast or audio book.

The next step is to build up a visual soundtrack that will complement and enhance the audio track. You can make this out of several different kinds of parts. You can use still photographs, for example, as in my old idea of the rough draft of the student film. But you can go farther with those still photographs in this case, because using video editing software on your computer, you can animate those still photographs, the way Ken Burns does on his documentaries. You can create transitions between those stills, for example, fades dissolves or wipes. You can also use animation to complement the soundtrack. You can use graphics – charts, diagrams, and suchlike. You can shoot live footage on video and cut that in.

You end up with a kind of hybrid monstrosity, part radio, part film, part animation, part montage, part PowerPoint presentation. And you can create this with very limited equipment for very little money. Hopefully, if you do it right, you’ll end up with something that’s almost as gripping as a live-action film – a lot more gripping than many live-action films that are produced for many millions of dollars nowadays – and something that can hold the audience’s interest for an hour and a half or even longer.

Okay, Tim, here’s my question: is this a new form, and could it work?

(If Tim reads this blog post, I will, in a later post, put down what his answers are.)

(Composed by dictation on Sunday 7 September 2008)

Commercials in Series

Microsoft discovers a new form for television commercials

This week, Microsoft Corp. debuted the first in a series of commercials designed to counter Apple companies successful “Mac versus PC” ads. The commercial featured Jerry Seinfeld and former Microsoft employee and CEO Bill Gates.

I rather liked the commercial. I thought it was amusing enough, in the tradition that Jerry Seinfeld had used in his television series of the 1990s. Once again, Seinfeld demonstrated his extraordinary generosity as a performer, playing straight man to Bill Gates’s comedian, and Gates was funny.

Other commenters in the tech world have disagreed. They don’t see the point of the air. They think that for $300 million Microsoft Corp. should have gotten a lot more for its money. And they wonder why the commercial didn’t mention Microsoft Vista or Microsoft Windows or indeed, any product that Microsoft has to sell.

They simply didn’t get it.

This commercial was not meant – was never meant – to stand on its own or to sell anything to anyone. All he needs to do, and all at once to do, is three things:

1. Introduce a comedic world where Jerry Seinfeld meets and hooks up with Bill Gates.
2. Amuse us so that we look forward to seeing more commercials in the series.
3. Make us feel good about Bill Gates, and by extension, about Microsoft Corp.

The commercial, in other words, only serves as an introduction to the whole series.

I wonder if this is a new concept for television commercials. The Apple commercials don’t run in series – instead, I think we should consider them as episodes which we can watch in any order, and each one of which serves to get the point across that the Apple Computer is superior to any computer running Microsoft operating system.

The idea behind the Microsoft ads is a “long-form” television commercial. Just as the television mini-series introduced longform television content, so these commercials will tell a complete story (or at least get across its complete point) over the course of several commercials. I don’t know how many – maybe up to a dozen – or maybe the idea is to leave it open ended, so that they can make and run as many as as the public can stand.

What I’m wondering is what the Hell is Bill Gates doing in these television commercials? I mean, he doesn’t even work for Microsoft anymore. And being a clown in a TV commercial doesn’t exactly enhance his status as one of the largest public benefactors in the world. On the other hand, Gates has always been the public face of Microsoft. And Steve Ballmer certainly wouldn’t be so effective teamed up with Jerry Seinfeld!

I’m not, of course, defending the basic concept that the television commercial is a form of entertainment and not an advertisement. I’ve written about that before after all. My belief is simple: an advertisement should sell something; that is its one and only purpose. Any company that spends $300 million to create a series of advertisements, and then goes on to spend God only knows how many millions of dollars more just to entertain its audience and try to glean a little bit of goodwill, has wasted a hell of a lot of shareholder value.

As part of the audience, I liked the commercial. But if I owned any Microsoft stock I’d be mad as hell.

(Composed by dictation Saturday 6 September 2008.)

The Shape of Things to Come

Nothing will save our civilized life except a radical change in how we treat one another and the world

Man’s activities are changing climate across the globe. Global warming will mean more water bound in the air, meaning some areas will be afflicted with wetter, more savage storms, while other areas will go from cornland into grassland; the grassland will turn to scrubland, and scrubland will become desert.

We are entering into the Sixth great Die-Off of species worldwide, scientists tell us. This is the first Die-Off that a single species of Earthbound creatures – man – has caused.

These views are widely known. And yet we do nothing to prevent it as a global society. And many of the most powerful entities – legislators and administrators of the public trust, corporate officers and directors, civic and community leaders – seem committed not only to refusing to prevent catastrophe, but they do whatever they can to block efforts to prevent it. In effect, they are doing what they can to accelerate and worsen the downfall of world civilization.

What can we do?

These are my first thoughts on the problem, basic notions, radical changes. Of course there are many things we can do as individuals and as groups, and these efforts are not in vain. But even the best of these endeavors will only save us from the immediate ruin that looms over us all in the remainder of this century; they do not address the basic problem that got us into the fix. For that, we need deeper and more radical change.

Some 50 years ago, for the first time, scientists put forth the notion that the planet’s natural systems all worked together in a harmonious, interlocked whole. These were the first of the modern environmentalists, the ecologists. James Lovelock in the 1960s came up with the Gaia thesis, the idea that the environment of the planet was a self-healing, self-regulating whole, that worked much like an organism. His fellow scientists at the time mocked Lovelock; in the decades since then, his ideas have become mainstream science, accepted as the basis of the discipline.

In order to work with Gaia (or with Nature, as the 18th century scientists called it) we must treat the Earth as a whole. And we must work with her over time – long periods of time – longer than any other civilization has ever planned or worked before.

To this end, this is what I propose:

• We must govern human society on a global basis wherever any enterprise affects the environment, whether that means land or sea or air.
• We must reverse our former priorities: rather than banning substances and practices that have been proven harmful, we must only allow substances and practices that have been proven to be innocuous.
• We must restore the natural systems that we have destroyed, and learn to live with and within them.
• We must limit human population world wide and within each environmental area.
• We must reduce our contribution of greenhouse gases to zero within a generation – 25 years – and further reduce carbon dioxide concentrations to pre-industrial levels.
• We must restore the oceans and the wetlands.
• We must learn what works and what doesn’t – to this end, we must establish weather monitoring systems worldwide, millions of them, and launch and employ a fleet of satellites to monitor weather and climate on a global, regional, and local levels.
• We must re-order the science of economics and strive not for growing production and ‘wealth,’ but for ‘happiness’ and justice.
• And we must plan ahead in much longer time periods than man has every tried to do before: I would say 1,000 years at a time, with a reappraisal of the thousand-year plan every century.

Achieving all this won’t be easy. Not only will we need to organize our human community on a global basis – which we have never yet managed – but we will also need to organize the community forward in time over great periods, and plan for the entire ecosystem (which we don‘t as yet even understand). Achieving it while preserving the necessary levels of human liberty and individual property and dignity and privacy will be even more difficult.

We can do this.

But I fear that we won’t.

In fact, I expect that we won’t. I expect that anything I write or say will be in vain.

But all the same I must say them and write them – just like everybody else who sees where we are and can step beyond their narrow, traditional viewpoints and see the shape of things to come.

(Composed on keyboard Friday 5 September 2008.)

When Science Fiction was Fun

Looking back at old covers of pulps

Today I happened to see on the web a collection of covers from the old science fiction pulp Astounding. The titles on display, as well as the lurid cover illustrations, looked so inviting! That was back in the period between 1931 and 1941 – the golden age of American pulp magazines. In those days, there wasn’t a hard line between science fiction and science fantasy. In the anthology collection The best of Leigh Brackett, Brackett’s husband Edmond Hamilton wrote that in those days when his wife wrote about penal colonies on the planet Mercury, what she wrote wasn’t that far away from what the scientists knew about the planet. Somehow I feel this is stretching the truth just a little bit. But all the same who cares – when the story that comes out of it is as exciting as Brackett stories.

Some of the Astounding covers feature titles written by Robert A. Heinlein. Of course Heinlein didn’t write pulps – at least he didn’t write science fantasy pulps. All the same, there’s his name on the covers, along with E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith and H. P. Lovecraft! Robert A. Heinlein, of course along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke during the 1950s changed science fiction forever. After the 1950s only ‘hard’ science fiction was allowed, and even something like Frank Herbert’s Dune was skirting that line.

The problem is that along the way science fiction lost all the fun and the adventure that science fantasy had to offer. Science fantasy, of course, was what Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote when he wrote his stories about the planet Mars. Back in those days you had steel-jawed heroes, quivering damsels in distress, bug eyed monsters, and zap guns. It was all pretty childish – but it was a lot of fun. I suppose that part of what happened after the 1950s is that the science-fiction fans grew older as a group, and they weren’t teenagers anymore. As such these middle-aged man had moved on from their childish fantasies and wanted something more realistic, more intellectual, and more challenging.

But the science fiction pulp magazines lost a lot of readers – most of the science-fiction fans were reading paperback novels at this point, and the whole field kind of contracted. There were a few pulps still being published – and the covers on the pulps were increasingly abstract art, only suggesting what might be going on in the scene. They were certainly not a lot of fun.

I think that one of the signs that the 1930s pulp’s got things right is how nostalgic people are for them, and how publishers are reprinting them. Somehow I don’t think that the 1960s science fiction pulps are going to inspire the same level of nostalgia. At least, they haven’t so far, and the kids who grew up reading them must be middle-aged by now, and if they’re ever going to get nostalgic they would’ve done so already.

It’s sad really.

So my real question is, how do we recapture that sense of adventure? Is there some way to join exciting adventure, lurid action, and hot babes, with science that doesn’t break the laws of physics too extravagantly?

I have a feeling that there have been attempts to revive space opera, and that I just haven’t read any, because I’ve been reading mostly fantasy in the past 30 years outside of the ‘classic’ science fiction of the 30s and 40s and 50s. Most of the space opera that I see right now looks to me (at least from the covers and the blurbs) to be militaristic in nature – there are big battles, but the emphasis is not on individual action so much as the esprit de corps and the rules and regulations of the military institutions – the deep space navy in other words. And somehow, this just wouldn’t do it for me.

(Composed by dictation Thursday 4 September 2008)

The Blind Talking to the Blind

One more blog post about voice recognition software. I expect this will be the last one in a while.

Today, I’m going to try something different. This entire blog post I’m going to dictate blind to Dragon NaturallySpeaking. All I’m going to do is talk in a normal tone of voice (well, a little louder and more clearly than I usually talk) and I’m not going to look at the screen and I’m just going to see what happens – what kind of results Dragon NaturallySpeaking will give me, and this will let me gain some insight into how well it would work if I just compose the story off the top of my head, into Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and then went back and tried to proofread it on the screen.

One thing I have noticed (and I think I’ve talked about this before) is that watching the pause that the program takes before it would type out what I say slows me down quite a bit, and whenever I see the program has made an error, it slows me down to correct it: and that influences my speech patterns so that, in advance, I tend to speak more slowly, speak more clearly, and speak in an artificial way – the way that the program is not set up to recognize. On the other hand, when I’ve done a few sentences that the program has accurately recognized, I start to speak faster and in a more normal manner.

So, that’s what I’m trying today. I’m afraid that if I looked at the screen, I would find some mistakes it would make, and I would then speak more clearly and artificially. This is death to any attempt to compose a story off the top of my head. Every time I have to deal with the program interrupts the flow of the story, my concentration on the subject matter of the story, and the whole mood that I get into what I call “story mode.”

Also, I’m sure that when I look at the screen, I’m thinking about the text – that is, the text as it is written, and not the text as it is spoken. Oral storytelling has to deal with the words as sound, the way the mouth moves to form the words, and the way the ear hears the words – in other words, poetry. Whenever you write (or at least whenever I write) any fictional tale, my mind gets into a groove – a heightened sense of reality, or at least a different sense of reality, because I’m no longer in the real world where my body is – at least not entirely. Instead a good part of me, and most of my mind, goes into the world of the story.

The world of the story is someplace else and following the story involves following the thread of the story through the events and episodes that the story tells us about. Composing a story is slightly different: instead of merely following this thread, the talesmen is creating the thread. And that involves choosing which path the thread is going to take out of the many paths that the thread could take. Every juncture of the tale involves a choice that the talesmen has to make – he makes this choice so that the audience does not have to. He makes this choice as surrogate for the characters in the tale – not only for any one character but for all the characters combined – or collectively as individuals. The talesmen also has to make these choices for events that do not directly result from the characters actions – things like weather, random influences, coin tosses, lucky events, and so forth.

Dealing with all these different threads and all these different choices involves a tremendous amount of concentration. In fact, I would even say that the effort of this concentration is superhuman – that is to say, it goes beyond what almost any person could do. So how can anybody tell a story?

I think the answer to that springs from dreams, and it also has to do with this different sense of reality that every talesmen enters into as he tells his story. I believe that this sense of reality comes out of the right side of the brain – the side of the brain that recognizes patterns – and it goes back far beyond the birth of the left side of the brain. This pattern recognition is vital to the survival of most any animal, and especially it’s vital to the survival of predators.

This kind of pattern recognition, I think, is connected to areas of genius in the human mind that are, at least so far, inexplicable. But we don’t have to explain them in order to utilize. As storytellers, all we need to do is recognize what that state of mind feels like from the inside, and remember, or at least cultivate the skills involved in getting ourselves into that frame of mind. That’s why any kind of interruption to this state or frame of mind will kill the flow of the story. And if the storyteller can’t maintain that flow, the story that he develops will not flow for his readers, either.

Anyway, that’s why I’m trying this experiment today. I want to see how well I’ve trained this program. I want to see how well I’ve trained myself and how well I speak – at least how well I speak in relationship to the program understanding. I haven’t even been using this program for a week, and I only did two training sessions and pointed it towards a few of my texts, so that it would pick up some of my vocabulary and the way that I write. So this is very early in the process for me – on the other hand, this program is said to be able to work very well with no training whatsoever. So I’m putting it to a real test today.

I have spoken today faster to the program than I have in any of my previous sessions. I don’t think I’m really in a frame of mind where I’d be capable of telling a real story. Part of the reason for this is that I’m still conscious of how I’m speaking – the mechanics of forming the words: phrasing, enunciating, and trying to become a more clear speaker to the microphone and through the microphone to the program. Also, I have never in my life told a story – at least a professional fiction story – off the top of my head in this way. I am no great raconteur. So this whole process of dictating a story is new to me, new to me even if I were just telling somebody, and not trying to dictate to a voice recognition program.

(Composed by dictation September 3, 2008)

The following is the original, uncorrected text as the program transcribed it.

One more blog post about voice recognition software. I expect this will be the last one in a while.

Today, I’m going to try something different. This entire blog post I’m going to dictate blind to Dragon NaturallySpeaking. All I’m going to do is talk in a normal tone of voice (well, a little louder and more clearly than I usually talk) and I’m not going to look at the screen and I’m just going to see what happens – what kind of results Dragon NaturallySpeaking will give me, and this will let me gain some insight into how well would work if I just compose the story off the top of my head, into Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and then went back and tried to proofread it on the screen.

One thing I have noticed (and I think I’ve talked about this before) is that watching the pause that the program takes before it would type out what I say slows me down quite a bit and whenever I see the program has made an error it slows me down to correct it and that influences my speech patterns so that in advance I tend to speak more slowly speak more clearly and speaking in an artificial way – the way that the program is not setup to recognize. On the other hand, when I’m done a few sentences that the program has accurately recognized, I start to speak faster and in a more normal manner.

So, that’s what I’m trying today. I’m afraid that if I looked at the screen I would find some mistakes they would make and I would then and speak more clearly at artificially. This is day off to any attempt to compose a story off the top of my head. Every time I have to deal with the program interrupts the flow of the story, my concentration of the subject matter of the story, and the whole mood that I get into what I mean “story mode.”

Also, I’m sure that when I look at the screen, I’m thinking about the text – that is, the text as it is written and not the text as it is spoken. Oral storytelling has to deal with the words as sound to wave them mouth moves to form the words and the way the ear hears the words – in other words, poetry. Whenever you write (or at least whenever I write) any fictional tale, my mind gets into who grew – a heightened sense of reality, or at least a different sense of reality because I’m no longer in the real world where my body as – at least not entirely. Instead a good part of me, and most of my mind, goes into the world of the story.

The world of the story is someplace else and following the story involves following the thread of the story through the events and episodes that the story tells us about. Composing a story a slightly different: instead of merely following this thread, the talesmen is creating the threat. And that involves choosing which path the thread is going to take out of the many paths that the thread could take. Every juncture of detail involves a choice that the talesmen has to make – he makes this choice so that the audience does not have to. He makes this choice as surrogate for the characters in the tale – not only for any one character but for all the characters combined – or collectively as individuals. The talesmen also has to make these choices for events that do not directly result from the characters actions – things like whether random influences coin tosses lucky events and so forth.

Dealing with all these different threads and all these different choices involves a tremendous amount of concentration. In fact, I would even say that the effort of this concentration is superhuman – that is to say, it goes beyond what almost any person could do. So how can anybody tell a story?

I think the answer to that springs from dreams, and it also has to do with this different sense of reality that every talesmen enters into AC tells his story. I believe that this sense of reality comes out of the right side of the brain – the side of the brain recognizes patterns, and it goes back far beyond in our history the birth of the left side of the party. This pattern recognition is vital to the survival of most any animal, and especially its vital to the survival of predators.

This kind of pattern recognition I think is connected to areas of genius in the human mind that are at least so far inexplicable. But we don’t have to explain them in order to utilize. As storytellers, all we need to do is recognize what bad state of mind feels like from the inside, and remember – or at least cultivate the skills involved in getting ourselves into that frame of mind. That’s why any kind of interruption to this state or frame of mind will kill the flow of the story. And if the storyteller can’t maintain that flow, the story that he develops will not flow for his readers, either.

Anyway, that’s why I’m trying this experiment today. I want to see how well I’ve trained this program. I want to see how well I’ve trained myself and how well he speak – and least how well I speak in relationship to the program understanding. I haven’t even been using this program for a week, and I only did two training sessions and pointed it towards a few of my texts so that it would pick up some of my vocabulary in the way that I write. So this is very early in the process of me – on the other hand this program is said to be able to work very well with no training whatsoever. So I’m putting it to a real test today. New paragraph I have spoken today faster to the program and I have in any of my previous sessions. I don’t think I’m really in a frame of mind or I be capable of telling a real story is. Part of the reason for this is that I’m still conscious of how I’m speaking – the mechanics of forming the words phrasing enunciating and trying to become a more clear speaker to the microphone and through the microphone to the program. Also, I have never in my life told a story – at least a professional fiction story – off the top of my head in this way. I am no great raconteur. So this whole process of dictating a story is new to me, new to me even if I were just telling somebody, and not trying to dictate to a voice recognition program.

Dictating a Tale

First time dictating a tale

Today, for the first time, I tried dictating a real tale to Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I had already written out a few months ago the material that I was dictating. I wrote it out longhand, and so I had a choice: I could either type this up with my clawlike hands, or I could try dictating it.

This is exactly the kind of thing that I want to use voice recognition software to help me. In the first place, composing longhand accesses a different part of the brain than typing with keys – because when you write longhand, you are actually drawing each letter or word, and this accesses the right half of your brain. Typing or keyboarding, on the other hand, is more digital (Ha-ha ha). Typing seems to use more of the left side of your brain, and so it is isolated from the deep, half conscious right brain.

But then, comes the boring part: once you have your composition in longhand, you still have to get it onto a computer, and typing just copying what you’ve already written is really boring. At best, you can make some changes along the way, but the problem then is that a lot of the time I make changes that I shouldn’t make – because in the very next sentence I find what I thought was missing. And yet, when all you’re doing is transcribing, there is no creativity in what you’re doing. Therefore, the ideal situation is to get it done just as quickly and as efficiently and is easily as possible.

That, I hope means voice-recognition.

Also, it’s always a good idea to read out loud something you’ve written to see how it sounds, to see how the tongue forms the words, and how the ear feels them. In the end, the true tale (and by that I mean the prototypical, original tale) is an oral tale – something to be spoken and to be heard, ideally in the dark by firelight.

So this is what I am thinking, that once I get good with voice recognition software, I’ll be able to transcribe my longhand compositions by speaking them aloud even as I would tell the tale off the top of my head or by memory, and in the meantime I can hear how that sounds and get some feedback on how “true” might tale-telling is.

Already I find that I’m speaking my old writing in a kind of bedside, fairy tale-telling manner – just as I might tell it to a young listener. When I get into that mode I find in fact that the software works better, and recognizes what I’m saying with greater accuracy. I suspect that one of the reasons for this is that I originally trained the program by reading a passage out of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland which I read in a similar fashion. I think, in fact, this is probably the way that I would read any tale to any audience. The program is designed to recognize natural speech – that means the natural intonations and phrasings with the rise and fall of the voice. Part of this involves linkages between various words so that the word is not recognized by the software as a discrete tonal unit, but rather as part of a phrase. The final sound of one word will become part of the sound of the next word unless you speak each word with a slight pause in between the syllables – a very unnatural way to speak, and a mode of speech that they say is more likely to strain your voice.

This is – what? – the third or fourth day I’ve been using the program, and already I find that I’m speaking more fluently, especially as I come to trust the program more and more and as the program learns how I talk. Also one of the great parts of this particular software is the way you can feed it a text file of your own writing style, and it will pick up your vocabulary – even the strange names and words that I’ve created. One odd thing that the program did was to start capitalizing a lot of words that I didn’t want to be capitalized. But I think that’s probably just the result of my own strange way of capitalizing some words.

In short, it probably took a lot longer than it should have, because I’m training the program at the same time that I’m using it. And I’m always checking each phrase, each sentence, each line that the program puts down, so there are a lot more pauses in between dictation. In addition, I find the spoken commands to navigate through the text often don’t work even when the program recognizes what I said and will neither type what I said as though it were more dictation nor will it obey the command and treat it as a command. (I haven’t any idea why this happens – then again, I still haven’t read all the manual, and that often helps!)

(Composed Tuesday, September 2, 2008)

Speaking in Tongues

I begin to train the voice-recognition software

I’ve always been interested in voice recognition software. Now, finally, it seems I have a powerful enough computer to be able to actually use it. Because the manner in which a talesman tells his tale influences both the style and content of the tale, I realize that dictation represents for me a new challenge – something that I have to learn, practice with, and gradually become a master (that is, if I ever do master it).

And because I was always interested in this voice recognition software as a writing tool, I expect that others are also interested in the process – so I thought that in my first days of training the program, I would do my blog posts using Dragon NaturallySpeaking exclusively. (For the record, I’m using Dragon NaturallySpeaking standard version 9.) As a result, the following few blog posts will probably be of very little interest to most of you, and quite interesting indeed to a small number of you.

My apologies in advance to go to and those of you who are bored.

Very well, let’s begin shall we?

The first thing that I notice about this process is how slow it is – not that the program is slow, but rather that I am slow in adapting to the program. This is not one of those cases where the program adapts to the user; this is, instead, an interactive dance between the program and the user. The program learns from the user but the user must also learn from the program. I have to learn how loud I should talk, how clearly I have to enunciate, and how fast I can go. My suspicion right now is that I can go a lot faster than I imagine, and that really it’s only my own hesitation that’s slowing everything down. I find, indeed, that if I speak faster the program, after a bit of hesitation, will catch up to me and will keep up with me. On the other hand, there is always the problem which is inherent in these programs – that is, that the program will misinterpret what you say, but it will not misspell anything. All the words will be correctly spelled – they’ll just be the wrong words! And that means that it’s a lot trickier to proofread text that has been dictated through a voice recognition program than it is to proofread text you type out. Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, and openoffice.org will all check your spelling as it is typed, and underline words that the program doesn’t recognize. But when Dragon NaturallySpeaking (or, I imagine, any other voice recognition software) doesn’t understand what you said, what it understands will all be spelled correctly – and that means no wavy red lines under any words to mark as signposts what you got wrong (or in this case, but the program misunderstood).

As a result, I find that I take each phrase and give a long pause after it in order to give the program enough time to type out the phrase – then I look at the phrase as the program understood what I said, and double check. This introduces many long pauses into the whole process of dictating into the program.

Just for an experiment, I’m going to try to speak without even checking the recognition for the next paragraph:

All right: right now I’m not even looking at the screen while I picked it. I’m speaking at pretty much a regular pace (a little slower than I would speak normally, actually). My voice is getting a little hoarse – and this is a problem with speaking not in the normal pull envoys, which is something we makers of the program warned us against. All the same, I find it almost impossible not to try to speak a little more clearly and precisely than I normally do. Also, I don’t normally talk for long periods of time – and so my vocal chords and what other other apparatus that I have for speaking isn’t really used to this kind of talking and talking and talking.

I must confess that I have glanced at the screen a couple of times and also that I put in a couple of pauses. But my thoughts are not flowing perfectly smoothly which is probably a result of my lack of experience in speaking extend for a UNIX way. So sometimes I have to pause just in order to put my thoughts together. When I write longhand or when I typed out what I’m writing on a keyboard, the process of putting the words down is generally slower than my own imagination in composing the lines. This might be because I’m more custom derided in that way, or it might just be the typing or writing longhand are both slower than speaking – and so I’m not used to composing quite so quickly as I am right now.

The previous two paragraphs were spoken just about as fast as I can compose this kind of stuff.

I see some boners already. For example, I said “tone of voice” but what Dragon NaturallySpeaking typed out in response was “pull envoys” and when I said “the makers of the program” the program thought that I said “we makers of the program.” You will also notice that I said “and what other other apparatus” – and that is in fact what I said, so don’t blame everything on the program. The next misunderstanding is so weird that I don’t even know what I meant to say – that’s where it typed out “extend for a UNIX way” I probably said something like “extended time” or “extended period.” Next up: “because I’m more custom derided that way” – which is how the program understood me when I said “because I’m more accustomed to writing that way.”

The number of errors is not great, but because it’s so difficult to proofread this kind of mistake, it really does slow you down at least until you get to the point where at the program understands you, and you understand the program – and also where you trust the program.

This is an especially big problem for any fantasy writers, because we are constantly inventing new words new terms new names – none of which exist in any dictionary in the world, and as a result we can’t expect a program like Dragon NaturallySpeaking to understand what we are saying without a lot of training. And it can be understandable that this period of training would take so long that most of us, incredibly frustrated, would give up before we ever reached the point of true proficiency – and, of course, we don’t know where that point is. There’s no way of telling just how good we can get with this program until we get there – in the meantime we have to trust that it will get good enough so that we can trust it without constantly checking how it understands what we are saying. This is much less a problem with the typical user, who does things like e-mail or standard business writing.

(Composed by voice Monday 1 September 2008)