Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Now with Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

I’ve had a lot of setbacks lately. So I figured this is the best time for me to take a look at the past see how I’ve progressed. It’s a great thing to do when you feel like that you are getting nowhere or things are just not working out. Because something always is working, despite the doom and gloom. It is impossible to make progress in everything you do 100% of the time. So at those times when it looks like you’re failing, it’s probably the best take a look at what you’ve done and at the progress you’ve actually made. I decided today to take a look at how my writing progressed.

When I first started blogging, most of my posts were written in longhand first. This is how I learned to write. And I figured it would help with my blogging. I could find a quiet place any time of the day and whip out my notebook faster than my laptop would boot up and get a few paragraphs done. Many times I would only start with a vague idea of where the post was going and most times it ended up somewhere unexpected. I figured I was saving time by getting possibly a first draft done while I would normally be just staring at the TV. This technique lasted for a while. In fact I swore by it. I didn’t understand how people could write articles straight from the keyboard. I was too conscious of the keyboard. It was still a tool and my hands were still in the learning phase.

Now although to I do write in longhand sometimes, I most commonly go directly to the laptop now. And I’ve tried hundreds of ways to make this part easier. I tried darkroom. It was supposed to keep me less distracted by making my laptop screen black and hiding all the other software from my view. I tried having a few posts in revision mode at the same time, but this ended with a bunch of post in revision mode forever. I’ve tried writing about Google Trends just to get the juices flowing. And everything worked for a while, but in the end it came down to just writing. Writing had to be done. All these tools and techniques were turning into excuses to play with software.

But with the practice of writing a lot of posts for over a year has done one thing. I learned how to transmit thoughts to the computer. Now it is more natural for me to go directly to the keyboard and start typing. In fact the faster I tried, the better chance I had outrunning the editor in my brain.

And today I tried something different, Dragon NaturalSpeaking. I have tried speech to text at least four or five times in the past. I figured it would be an easier way for me to write posts, articles and various other things. But it never worked for me. Any attempt I made to write using text to speech eventually turned into an experiment in surreal poetry. I would say something and the software would type something else.

So now it’s time for me to give it a try again. And hopefully, speaking complete thoughts will become more natural to me. Because this software definitely beats the text to speech program that comes with Vista. We shall see. It’s going to take a bit of practice. There can be no stray sounds because the Dragon interprets them as words, but as far as the text speech to text does, it works pretty well. In fact I’m impressed. It can even spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, no kidding.

All I did yesterday after I installed the software was go through the first initial training session. I guess this post would have turned out better if I would have gone through all of the training sessions, but it’s pretty amazing that it did as well as as it did. In fact I definitely see this software being very useful in the future, even when I don’t have to spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. And this post took about 15 minutes to write and edit. I just might just be in the market for a better microphone.