Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

I'm making a renewed attempt with speech-to-text. At least three times in the past I attempted to use voice command software in place of typing and each time I gave up frustrated. The last time I made a concentrated effort to experiment with voice recognition was at least three years ago. My previous efforts all ended because I became frustrated with the lack of recognition. So far this round seems to be fairing better.

My current experience is being driven by Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred, which is definitely my personal best experience in using a speech product. Rather than struggling with the software recognizing words, I'm having a different kind of learning curve. The struggle is to get used to the idea of speaking things I normally type. I'm a quick study on the idea of assigning keyword commands that automatically input text like signature files or frequent responses to common questions, but actually thinking through the process of saying outloud what I plan to put on paper is an entirely different process.

The speech part of my brain wants to say something very different than the typing part of my brain and so I'm having this internal battle over how to specifically verbalize what comes very natural through typing. I honestly can't say enough good things about the software. In terms of recognizing what I say, it works quite well and the infrequent mistakes are memorized so the software doesn't repeat them in the future.

My only complaint at the moment is too many verbal commands to learn. If I can eliminate virtually all mouse movements, I'll be elated, but I don' think the software is quite up to the task of some things I'd like to try. For example, I want to read my email by using voice commands to move to the next message, reply to messages and send messages all without using the keyboard or clicking the mouse. So far, I'm able to combine voice commands to do some, but not all of those things.

I'm still not fully comfortable with speaking as a replacement for typing, although if I keep at this I may be a better speaker because I'm thinking more about what's coming out of my mouth. Much of what I've posted over the last few days is a blend of spoken text and typed text, not because the speech-to-text isn't working, but because I'm concentrating on a completely different mode of communication and I don't have it down just yet.