My Initial Thoughts On MacSpeech Dictate

“The story so far…”

My new online productivity tool, MacSpeech Dictate, arrived this morning; “Dictate” is, according to developer MacSpeech, “the premier speech recognition solution”.

The product borrows the speech recognition ‘engine’ from Dragon’s “Naturally Speaking” application, which runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system. For those of you running Windows, and wishing to explore speech recognition as a productivity tool, you should consider Dragon’s “Naturally Speaking”.

It seems to be running fairly smoothly so far, but time will tell as to how effective a blogging tool “Dictate” turns out to be for me. I’ve never been lightning quick when typing, and am certainly not the “professional typist” - even in my own imagination. However, I do tend to be fairly quick with at least two fingers on each hand!

But what’s the point?

My hope with “Dictate” though, is not necessarily to speed up the process, as much as to improve creativity in producing content online. If I can ‘chat’ my ideas onto the page, without too much ‘typo’ (’speak-o’) correction, then I believe it’ll serve its purpose in the area of creative freedom. Too often, I feel a bit stifled when typing, purely based on the fact that my thoughts run quicker than my fingers. More creativity, for me, should translate - or dictate even - into an increase in productivity.

Probably a good way to sum up, so far, is this - I’ll still be needing my hands! :o)

Okay, so show us…

Much of the text arrives on the page fairly accurately, though it’s proving to be far from fool proof. For example, let me just speak, and we can see how well my words translate in the next couple of sentences. I’ll leave the text unedited to allow you to judge for yourself:

“I’m sitting in the same room as my wife, who is currently working through a whole bunch of paper worked. There is music playing, I shared running now and then, so things are not altogether quiet.”

Now, that should’ve read as follows…

“I’m sitting in the same room as my wife, who is currently working through a whole bunch of paper work. There is music playing, a shredder running now and then, so things are not altogether quiet.”

So, as you can see, it’s a fairly accurate representation of the words as they’re spoken, though not 100% precise. I should say that I do have a Scottish accent, though not too broad! However, the last time I checked, we were still speaking English - which is consistent with the installed language file :o)

So…

For me, I’m very, very pleased with the product.

I had it in the back of my mind, that if I was unhappy with the product, then I could always return it to Amazon. I think I can safely say that I’ll be pressing on with my newfound verbal blogging tool.

In fact, that’s me from here on…

“The Verbal Blogger”.