Thursday 24 August 2006
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Pic of the day: In this box... The Dragon has arrivedI am, of course, talking about Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the speech recognition software. It arrived in the mail today from Amazon.co.uk. I already wrote about it when I ordered it, so I won't repeat myself. And it may be because I am a foreigner, but I would not recommend using it right out of the box without training. In my experience, it requires approximately as much training as its predecessor, version 8. Also like its predecessor, it has problems with recognizing the words at the beginning and end of the sentences. This does seem to improve over time, though. I am pretty sure at least one of my long-time readers remembers when I first got speech-recognition software back in 2002. I dictated a short paragraph without editing or correcting it afterwards. The result was hilarious, but not very informative. Even so, it was a great improvement over one example I had seen on the net a few years earlier. I have no idea who the people were who paid for the first versions of these programs. Perhaps they lacked arms altogether. And toes. And noses. But for your entertainment, and for future reference, I am going to do it again. To not blame the program for my own indecisiveness, I will read a paragraph I have written earlier this year: I use of the expression "imaginary money" when I talk about borrowing against future income which is not likely to exist. In the case of middle-class America, the imaginary money these days comes from the rising house prices of the future, which are unlikely to manifest no that interest rates are shutting your company's outdoor the market. Actually wages and salaries have not risen at all for years, except for the CEOs and their closest henchmen. We have a nation in the throes of a massive spending of imaginary money. How is that a robust? It is as robust as a hot thereby alone at the peak of its size. Here is the corrected version: I use the expression "imaginary money" when I talk about borrowing against future income which is not likely to exist. In the case of middle-class America, the imaginary money these days comes from the rising house prices of the future, which are unlikely to manifest now that interest rates are shutting young families out of the market. Actual wages and salaries have not risen at all for years, except for the CEOs and their closest henchmen. We have a nation in the throes of massive spending of imaginary money. How is that robust? It is as robust as a hot-air balloon at the peak of its size.
As you can see, the speech recognition is still good for some comic
relief. But it can now work flawlessly for several sentences, something
that was almost unbelievable only a few years ago. Actually, that is a
bit creepy: You might start trusting it, and then suddenly while you are
thinking of something else, your trusted servant writes something
shocking and outrageous and passes it off as you. I would
I may be using this program from time to time to dictate my journal. My wrist has been growing worse again, although it is not nearly as bad as it used to be all the time a couple years ago. The problem is (still) that my throat does not hold up too well to this amount of talking, either. I am still living alone, and my work does still not require much talking most days. In fact, we have been moving away from classroom training and toward online training... but I am not supposed to talk about work, so I won't. I still sing from time to time when I am alone, though. I suppose that helps keep my voice in shape... or perhaps I will have to sing to my computer? Draconian measures, indeed. |
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