Since I have to use the onscreen keyboard whenever I type anything, writing blog posts and emails is something I do with less and less frequency—especially if it's anything longer than a couple of paragraphs. And so I've decided to give this speech recognition thing another try. I've tried it in the past, but always ended up giving up because the thing never seemed to understand what I was saying. But that was then, and this is now, so we'll see how it goes.One thing that is surprising (and a bit frustrating) is how different speaking what you want to write is from typing what you want to write. When typing (or writing with pen or pencil) the thoughts just seemed to flow out as you're thinking them—but with speech dictation, the speaking seems to interrupt the thinking. It makes it very difficult to think ahead—especially when you keep sneaking glances at the screen and noticing the typos it's making (although, encouragingly enough, the sentence before this parenthetical bit did not make a single mistake).
I probably should have noted the time when I started this, just to see how long it takes. Supposedly, the speech recognition software gets more accurate the more you use it. I certainly hope so. I have noticed this seems to do better when I speak in short sentence fragments (which may work to my advantage, since I often don't have the breath to get through a whole sentence anyway).
Patty (who is sleeping in the other room) just coughed, and the program typed, "If". That's pretty funny.
For some reason, this thing still keeps screwing up some pretty simple commands. Sometimes it tries to do something that's not even close to what I asked it to do. Just my luck—I've got a hearing impaired speech recognition program!!!
Unfortunately, the Open Office program that I usually use to write doesn't work with speech recognition programs. That figures. (Good heavens, I just swallowed and the program asked, "What was that?" It'll be interesting to see what it says if I ever get the hiccups!)
