Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Blogging by dictation

This is my first attempt at trying to write in my blog with voice rather than keyboard. So far the accuracy seems quite good. The text translation does have some lag between the talking and the appearance on the screen. That is a little bit disconcerting for the composing. But I suspect one can get used to this without too much trouble.  I'm so conscious of the dictation it is harder for me to think about what it is I want to say. 

Let me try to talk about a subject that is near and dear to me, which is over achieving students working so hard that they don't get enough sleep. There is an article in today's New York Times by Frank Bruni that discusses this for high school students in California near Stanford. My article that should appear in Inside Higher Ed is on the same subject but for college students. This is not for all college students but a particular subset, the ones who are coming from the East Asian countries, particularly China and Korea.

Let me conclude this very brief post with one other observation. For this to replace typing for me, it needs to become unobtrusive. So far that has not happened. I need a lot of practice at it to get comfortable with it. Whether I have the patience to do that practicing is the question. The technology itself is quite impressive in how it renders the text from the voice.

- - - - -

Typing here.  I edited the above for the line spacing between the paragraphs (I didn't know the voice command for that) and for some other changes.  But this (Mac OS 10.9 with enhanced dictation, which must be downloaded) is much better than what I remember from using Dragon, which I mainly used not for dictation, but rather to transcribe voice recordings.  I wonder how this works for transcribing.  It is the next thing I will try.

No comments: