This blog post is being dictated using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I just got this program, and I’m trying it out for the first time. It’s a little weird for a lot of reasons. First of all, it’s strange to be composing out loud. I hadn’t realized how much my writing is connected to the movement of my hands. Trying to figure out what I’m going to say and then say it out loud seems completely foreign to me.
On top of that, of course, there is the problem that I’m still training the software, and it keeps misunderstanding me. So that means I’m interrupted in the middle of every thought to correct things that are mistyped. However, this program is much better at understanding me than the default speech recognition program on Windows. So I’m confident that if I keep at it, eventually I’ll able to use this program to type my novels.
The reason that I’m using this program is that my hands hurt. I’ve had numbness in my hands and fingers since about 2005. Now that I’ve been writing full time, it’s gotten much worse. In fact, this morning I woke up and my left hand hurt so bad that I knew I had to do something. My boyfriend Aaron had mentioned that he had this software and that all I needed to do was install it on my computer. However, I didn’t really want to use it. Training the software would be a really big pain, I just knew it. Also, as I mentioned, I was worried that talking instead of typing would be really difficult. And as I’m discovering, it is. I’m not sure why it takes so long to dictate as opposed to type. I know that I write much faster when I’m typing. Additionally, talking at my computer screen sort of makes me feel as if my brain is full of mush. For some reason, whenever I try to think of the next thing to say it’s so much harder when I’m trying to say it out loud. I’m hoping that it will get easier the longer I use it.
So this blog post is going to be pretty short. Frankly it is taken me far too long to compose this, and I am tired. God knows what this is going to do to my productivity. However, I don’t want to injure myself either so I’ve got to give this speech recognition stuff the old college try before I give up on it completely.
Let me know if you think my “voice” seems different when I’m speaking as opposed to when I’m typing.
