For whatever reason I enjoy blogging. So much so that I have about four or five blogs online at this moment; if I enjoy a topic I tend to research it and want to store and share resources and articles via a blog or website. Needless to say it is difficult to come up with enough time to write posts for all of the ideas I have in my head.
This past weekend I finally took the plunge and bought a tool to help me get these ideas and posts onto the Internet. Enter Dragon NaturallySpeaking by Nuance software.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is dictation software. What this means is that you can speak into a microphone and the software will recognize what you are saying and type into most places you will find yourself typing: Microsoft Word, WordPress, e-mail such as Outlook and Outlook express, Skype and really any other text areas.
As I said earlier I purchased the software this weekend. It took a bit of time to get the software installed and setup. As you can imagine dictation software has a huge task at hand in that it has to be able to identify the different ways that people pronounce words, different accents and different cadences at which people speak. In order to handle these differences when you first start with Dragon NaturallySpeaking you go through some training exercises where Dragon tries to learn about how you speak.
One of the really cool things about this training is that they provide you with selected pieces of text that you have to speak so that Dragon can adjust itself to your speech. At the beginning of the training these pieces of text consist of some helpful information about Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Putting these texts together with the exercises means that you get up and running faster than if you had to read all of this information first (and if you're like me you probably wouldn't read this information and would dive right in).
So I bought the software on a Saturday and on Sunday did the training in the morning and by later Sunday afternoon I had written three chapters of a course that I will be providing later on this winter. I can honestly say that there is no way I would have completed that much work in so little time if I was typing. I think one of the bonuses is that my hands are not on the mouse and keyboard and so in those moments when I need to stop and think I am not tempted to surf the Internet!
Later on Sunday evening - my wife and son were not home - I managed to write three blog posts for some of my blogs and again there is no way I would have done it if I was simply typing.
I've written all of this text with Dragon NaturallySpeaking today. I took some time out, about 10 minutes, to do some more training so that my accuracy with the software improves. I also spent some more time with the tutorial. The tutorial helps you with some of the commands for using the dictation software.
I've only had this for a few days and mostly used it for dictating messages and blog posts but the software can also be used to launch programs, navigate the web, and it has some shortcuts that you can use to interface with Outlook and other Microsoft products; I haven't used these yet.
Anyways this is it for now. I think I'll update this page as I learn new tips and tricks for using Dragon NaturallySpeaking.