Wednesday 15 September 2004

Pic of the day: I'm looking a lot like this lately.

Plantronics day

If we look back to last fall, I wanted to take part in the National Novel Writing Month, but my hand was obviously not going to let me write that much. I already had a speech recognition program, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 5 from ScanSoft. Sadly, it had great problems understanding even simple phrases. Some of the sounds were simply ignored, such as the letter "L" in most contexts. Correcting errors took so much time and attention that it was virtually useless. It did have some entertainment value, and I am sure it would be better than nothing if you had lost your arms in an accident. Oh yes, much better than nothing. But not nearly good enough to write a 50 000 word novel in 30 days.

Last year, I bought the latest version of the program, version7. To the best of my knowledge there has not been released another, and I believe they are bought up by one of the big ones so don't expect more innovation. (Though we may be pleasantly surprised ... it happens.) Anyway, there were some added features but personally I bought it for the improved speech recognition algorithm. The new program recognized more words with fewer errors, which is good. I used it to good effect during the writing, too. But not good enough. I had to give up on the story, I was not even close to finishing by the end of the month. And in the meantime I had once again degraded my arm from bad to horrible. I could not continue and still function in my job, and it is morally dubious to drop out of the workforce in order to write novels, unless you can pay for it yourself. (Or sell the novels, but we have a chicken and an egg here.)

This year, if the Lord lets me live, I intend to take part in the NaNoWriMo again. I don't expect to finish it, but it could still be great fun. Remember my slogan: "The most important is not to win but to have a cute rival." Still, it must be a try, not just a fake. So ... what is new? A Plantronics headset with microphone is new.

***

During the lunch break I slink into the computer and telecoms shop Telehuset in Kristiansand, the city where I work. I look around for a little while and find three sets of headsets with microphones, all of them from Plantronics. They come with different prices and different specifications. The most expensive of the three was the USB version. It is basically a sound card of its own, or at least my machine treats it that way. A few inches from the actual USB plug there is an oblong black object that accepts the two mini-jack plugs from the headphones and the microphone respectively. I believe this is the digital preprocessing unit. The microphone has built-in noise reduction, which is just what the doctor ordered. Well, what the doctor would have ordered if I had admitted that I was planning to write a novel in one month.

I took the thing with me home, having received a promise from my contact in the shop that I would get my money back if it did not work as expected. They don't usually do this, of course, as long as it fills the specifications on the package, which are in engineer-speak and probably not beginner level engineer-speak either. But I'm a returning customer, not to mention the journal. ^_^

Well, you know what? It works. It works astoundingly well. Oh, there are still words the program mistakes frequently. But there are no sounds that are universally ignored or mistaken for other sounds. I believe that with regular training for the coming month and a half, the program should be used to my style and my choice of phrases. And hopefully my throat should be used to talking for more than 5 minutes a day.

***

As regular readers will know, I live utterly alone. I don't go out at night. I do go to work, but I work with computers. I do provide user support, but being able to listen is more important than being able to talk. I am a good listener by now, I think this is a scientific fact. But on the few occasions when I have had to teach in something like a classroom situation, I have developed a sore throat after one day. Usually I only say a few sentences and then there may be a quarter of an hour before I need to do it again.

The short of it is, my throat is not used to this level of talking. And I still have to strain a bit to speak clearly enough, to keep the words from smearing too much together. The program actually works better if you speak continuously but with distinct words. Not. Like. This. Butnotlikethis either. So I have to pay more attention to my speaking than I normally do, and this strain makes my throat run out even faster.

For this reason, I am actually typing this, using OpenOffice.org and its auto-complete feature. It saves some of the typing and catches some of the typos, and I can use it once a day or so without damaging my wrist so much that it hurts overnight. But I've already dictated a couple entries with it, so I'm not complaining. The Plantronics USB headset definitely made speech recognition a more viable alternative. If nothing else hits me (yeah, right) I just might have a chance to get some good writing done.

I believe the model I use is 45, there are several supposedly even better models, the top of the line being the 500 at over $100. I hope I won't need that. It won't be this year at least. Anyway, that one is "enchanced for gamers". Don't look at me that way ...