For me, voice-controlled editing and navigating was a godsend. Sure, using a keyboard and mouse may be faster here, but it’s also way more intensive on your wrists. All you do is use voice controls Dragon teaches you to navigate to the right spot in the document, and then you make the necessary changes. You can pretty much edit your entire document without ever touching the keyboard. The first were the voice-controlled editing options. But it excelled in two other ways that I hadn’t expected. In short, I was impressed with the accuracy of the program. I have never managed to write that much in such a short time when typing. But, the fact remains that seven thousand words in four sprints is a record for me. That means a careful editing afterward is absolutely necessary. You’re and your get mixed up, and the same is true for its and it’s, and of course there are many more similar examples. For one, you have to think about voicing each capital letter, each period and comma. Again, these were not perfect words, and they would certainly need editing. I did a total of four sprints, each forty-five minutes long, and managed to write almost 7000 words. Tuesday, I worked with the software even longer. Again, this could also have been caused by my accent. Cock turned into caulk, fuck into fog, etc. Others seemed to be caused by the program being rather prude, LOL. Sure, there were still plenty of mistakes, but most of them were caused by me slightly mispronouncing words. What surprised me most was the accuracy of the transcription. A short trial run Monday evening already resulted in 1600 words written in a forty-five-minute period. Luckily, that fear turned out to be unfounded. It seemed easy and intuitive enough, but even in the tutorial it didn’t recognize my pronunciation of a few of the commands, so I got worried right away. ![]() Once I had everything set up, I did the Dragon tutorial to familiarize myself with the program. I’m a diehard Mac fan, so you can imagine how much it took for me to go back to windows, even it was just for dictation purposes. It took me a little while to set everything up, as I haven’t used Windows since…probably 1998. I decided to invest in a cheap Windows laptop, as well as the Windows version of Microsoft office, and of course the Dragon dictation software. But this time, I would have to make a few more investments to try the Windows version. And so I decided to give dictating another chance. No wonder, because when it works well, dictating is obviously a lot faster than typing.īut when my wrist started acting up, I knew I had to come up with a solution. As a matter of fact, they weren’t coming at all.Īfter that experiment, I had pretty much decided dictating was not from me, even though I knew many successful authors use it. Now that I had to speak them out loud, the sentences weren’t coming as easily. I had a problem speaking out the sentences that seem to form so easily when I typed. I couldn’t imagine it working much better than the Mac dictation software I had tried out that turned out to suck…at least, for me.Īnother problem I ran into is that dictating differs fundamentally from typing when you write. The problem was that it was the Windows version of this dictating software that was superb, but according to all reviews the Mac version sucked, so that would not be a solution to my problem. ![]() I had heard about dictating software that was supposed to be really good: Dragon Naturally Speaking. It kept making so many mistakes that I spent more time correcting and editing than writing. It turns out, that software doesn’t really like my slight accent when I speak English. I use a MacBook Pro, and Mac has built in dictation software that’s gotten a lot of positive reviews, so a few months back, I decided to try that. ![]() I had tried dictation before, but it hadn’t really worked for me. That’s why I did some research on Monday and decided to invest in dictation software. Over the weekend, my wrist seemed to be doing better, but even an hour of typing on Monday aggravated the problem again. It’s also the reason why I haven’t posted yesterday and the day before. I suspect I have a beginning case of carpal tunnel syndrome, and so for the last few days, I’ve been busy trying to figure out an alternative to typing. But more importantly, my wrist has been really bothering me lately. Usually, I would’ve posted earlier, but first of all, I’ve been crazy busy this week. Today is Wednesday, and of course, that means it’s time for Writer Wednesday.
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