A little over 2 years ago I wrote a blog post about using a pen instead of the keyboard.
Today I am writing this blog post not with a pen, not with a keyboard, and almost without the use of a mouse.
A few weeks ago the nice people at Nuance sent me an evaluation copy of Dragon Dictate the Mac.
(This entire blog post, without manual corrections, is coming to you via Dragon Dictate.)
I have tried to use voice dictation software probably since I 1st started to use a computer. In the early days the software even required me to install a special voice processing card and even later when the hardware in computers improved dictating was little better than OCR with many errors.
The installation of Dragon Dictate took a few minutes and then you have to wait a little bit more for it to build its dictionaries etc.
When you have it up and running there is a training process which you must go through. The last time I tried this it felt like I had to read out the entire contents of “War and peace". But the training process this time could not taken more than a few minutes. Helpfully the training process required me to read some very useful information about how to use DragonDictate.
So what does all this mean to me?
Well, hopefully I will be writing more blog posts from now on as recently I found difficult to find the time to actually write them. But this hasn't meant that I haven't had something to say.
In fact this blog post which so far is 280 words long has taken me no longer to write than it is has taken you to read. Of course there is an added benefit of relying on software to compose this blog post. I now no longer need to use a word processing spellcheck or to check my grammar.
One thing that really surprised me was when I said Joomla! for the 1st time. Wow! It even knows how to say Joomla! and make sure that the silly Exclamation mark is always used. How cool is that?
The only downside to this whole process is that I am sat here talking to a computer and getting strange looks from everybody else here in Starbucks. Perhaps in 2 years time instead of writing about a blog post with a pen, or with my voice I will be writing a blog post about thinking to my computer.
