Voice Dictation is Here
Earlier this week I received an e-mail from the www.nuance.com
In the past I purchased a product from them called PaperPort which is used for document management on my scanner. About once a year I received an e-mail for them to upgrade the software and this last week I received an e-mail to purchase DragonDictate. This is a product that I've heard of before but never used so I thought would give it a try.
This blog post is being dictated by voice, and I'm learning as I go. So far I have not had to touch the keyboard to dictate this blog post and I'm more than impressed with the software. I'm not wearing a headset I'm just talking into the air and my MacBook Pro tilt in microphone is picking up the speech that's being dictated.
I did spend about 10 minutes going through the voice training which was nice to do actually because it was a paragraph or a few pages actually that told me how to better talk to the computer to make it better understand where more easily understand what I'm saying.
One thing that I'm noticing is that it's much easier to create a run-on sentence when your voice dictating. Where when you are typing you have the ability to read what you're saying so when I'm doing this I'm actually not even looking at the screen. I'm just staring off into space thinking about what I'm going to say and every once in a while a look back at the screen to confirm that what I said is in fact what is being written in live writer.
So this is just the first day in fact the first couple of minutes that I've had the software installed and when the microphone is active it dictates text into whatever the active window is so theoretically I can use this for billing or e-mail or live writer blogging or anything so I will see what happens. I think that I would like to have a shortcut key that would turn on or off the microphone/dictation service. For example a few minutes ago the phone rang and I started talking on the phone and I looked back and a bunch of those words were inside this blog post which I did delete with voice by saying ... "scratch that".
In looking through the menu options I do see the hotkeys are programmable so I've set my microphone dictation on off to the shortcut key of control+alt+v.
So that's it my first blog post by voice which is much faster than actually typing but I think I'm still slower because I don't know all the tricks. So we'll see what happens in a couple days it's kind of a cute thing if it works it will be great; if it doesn't then that I have the 15 day return policy to send it back!