slaingod

So it’s pretty sad: I just got voice-recognition software but I’m trying to come up with things to say. I guess the first thing I can do is do a review of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. So far so good though there have been a few snags. Remembering punctuation is one of the hard things to get down. There are couple of gotchas if you use it on a computer with Comodo Firewall that you should be aware of. The NaturallySpeaking executables tried to interact with every other executable on the system and one really annoying problem was that when the executable tried to access the keyboard somehow locked out all the other keyboards attached the system. I finally figured out that I could control alt delete and things would come back. It may make sense to just bite the bullet and set the Dragon NaturallySpeaking executables as trusted.

Getting set up I spent about an hour reading dictation to improve my recognition statistics. I have to admit it was kind of fun reading Kennedy’s address as one of the options. It really brings home the fact that you don’t do a lot of reading and speaking at the same time in your general life, or at least mine, especially text that you’re not necessarily familiar with. But practice makes perfect and after a while you sort of get into a groove. I’m still not the point where trusted to really capture all of my thoughts as I speak them without any kind of delay, but I’m getting there. I do tend to mumble a little bit in my normal conversation so I have to be a little extra careful with my diction.

I could really see this becoming useful if I am able to incorporate it more into my daily life, particularly with my coding. There are a number of tools out there to help coders use voice-recognition, but I will have to see if they have anything for Ruby and/or ActionScript that is worth the effort to get set up, or possibly integration with TextMate. By TextMate I mean of course the E text editor on Windows, a sanctioned clone of TextMate, with all the bundles etc.

That’s it for now; I’ll keep you posted. In the grand tradition of all voice-recognition reviews, this review was done using voice-recognition.