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You talking to me...?
Sep. 23rd, 2008 07:57 pmI've just reinstalled Dragon NaturallySpeaking. There was something giving trouble that was more easily fixed by removal and reinstallation than by fiddling with it. That was a minor aberration; by and large it's a good voice-to-text dictation program - so long as you don't catch a cold half way through a project. If that happens, you'd better have put the last time to good use and and trained a User as your voice complete with all the coughs, sniffs and sneezes...
(No, I don't have a cold - but I do remember trying to run my normal User through Dragon when I had 'flu. I'd have had better recognition speaking Klingon. Under water. While snorting treacle. And if that's not an image you care to visualize, think what it felt like... Ew.)
Diane and I have been using the program for a long time, ever since it was called DragonDictate and had to be used by speaking One-Word-At-A-Time. I see that Wikipedia claims some exorbitant price for the early program, but whoever was paying $2000 a pop, it wasn't us. :-)
Dictation and playback always seems a bit strange even when you're just using an ordinary cassette recorder: your voice never sounds right the first few times (something to do with hearing yourself without bone conduction or something) and the temptation to start every dictation with "Take a letter, Miss Jones..." is quite strong.
Starting dictation using voice-to-text is even stranger, because unless you're Victor Borge and always pronounce your punctuation, saying "comma", "semi-colon", "open/close quotation marks" (this one with or without using your fingers to make air-quotes) and all the rest sounds very peculiar both to yourself and any independent observer in the room, including the cat.
But once used to it, the system is quite efficient. In particular, it's very handy when writing words or phrases that use accents or diacritical marks. So long as you can remember what the accents are called, it's much faster to say "Spell That", then spell out the word with e-acute or o-circumflex or whatever, than hunt each accented letter down in Character Map or remember what the Alt+num-pad code might be.
What made us laugh was to discover that while the program had to be taught to recognize our pronunciation of some words, it seemed to have all the main swear words off pat, right out of the box.
The Beta testing story behind that is probably something best left untold.
(No, I don't have a cold - but I do remember trying to run my normal User through Dragon when I had 'flu. I'd have had better recognition speaking Klingon. Under water. While snorting treacle. And if that's not an image you care to visualize, think what it felt like... Ew.)
Diane and I have been using the program for a long time, ever since it was called DragonDictate and had to be used by speaking One-Word-At-A-Time. I see that Wikipedia claims some exorbitant price for the early program, but whoever was paying $2000 a pop, it wasn't us. :-)
Dictation and playback always seems a bit strange even when you're just using an ordinary cassette recorder: your voice never sounds right the first few times (something to do with hearing yourself without bone conduction or something) and the temptation to start every dictation with "Take a letter, Miss Jones..." is quite strong.
Starting dictation using voice-to-text is even stranger, because unless you're Victor Borge and always pronounce your punctuation, saying "comma", "semi-colon", "open/close quotation marks" (this one with or without using your fingers to make air-quotes) and all the rest sounds very peculiar both to yourself and any independent observer in the room, including the cat.
But once used to it, the system is quite efficient. In particular, it's very handy when writing words or phrases that use accents or diacritical marks. So long as you can remember what the accents are called, it's much faster to say "Spell That", then spell out the word with e-acute or o-circumflex or whatever, than hunt each accented letter down in Character Map or remember what the Alt+num-pad code might be.
What made us laugh was to discover that while the program had to be taught to recognize our pronunciation of some words, it seemed to have all the main swear words off pat, right out of the box.
The Beta testing story behind that is probably something best left untold.
