Chinese Whispers
This is an unusual post, because I am dictating it. Just before Christmas, I received an e-mail offer for a product called Dragon Naturally Speaking 9. It is normally a $200 product, (at least the non-basic one is) but the offer was for $99.99, including headset/mic. I filed it away in my action folder to locate at a later date, then over Christmas, feeling slightly more flush because of a company bonus, I took a closer look. Reading the testimonials, it sounded too good to be true, but there was a satisfaction money back guarantee, so I thought that if it did what it said on the tin it was worth £50 out of shades wallet. When it came to ordering, it cost a bit more than that, due to shipping and VAT, because the package included a headset and physical shipment. Anyway, I loaded it up into my laptop yesterday and turned it on this morning. The training only took about 15 minutes and after another half hour of tutorial, and now happily dictating this straight into WordPress. All I’ve had to do on the keyboard is to hyperlink, title the blog piece, embedd the picture and click publish. I had to correct a number of muddled words of course, but this will get easier over time. The software seems to be less dyslexic than me on a bad day!
I’m very impressed, the tyranny of QWERTYUIP slowly draws to a close…
January 18th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
I’m pretty flipping impressed, too !
Have you tried to throw it off the scent with your best Geordie accent ?
January 18th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
How man, not yet pet, gizza chance man.
January 18th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Eh ?
January 19th, 2008 at 2:41 am
My cell phone doesn’t even recognize my accent when I do voice activated dialing! Mind you I think I am better typing since I change my mind so much along the way. Did you literally just speak or did you have little notes on paper first? But it is impressive and great for handicapped people.
January 19th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Womble, “I say Sir, I haven’t tried talking in a strong regional accent yet, I need an opportunity to get used to it first.”
JMB, I just spoke it as it went along, with a post-article keyboard tweak. There are commands for it to ignore you, change spelling, delete stuff etc. although I don’t think they all necessarily work fully when embedded in applications. I did have to speak fairly calmly with clear diction in a quiet room- as I normally blog with the telly on for Karen (or David) & conversations around me then it will be much more difficult to get clean results at times.
My biggest worry was that the laptop wasn’t powerful enough to run it as the software has a high requirements spec.