Tuesday, June 10, 2008

A new meaning to the word "writing"...

Speech recognition...

When my Pop & I were checking out Epcot in early May, I saw a demo of a guy speaking and the computer screen above him were the words he was saying as he said 'em.

I immediately thought, great way to write a book...

Today over lunch I saw various software from $50-$200 off Amazon. Such as this one... Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Standard

I did a quick discovery search on Microsoft Word and found they have something similar. I tried it out and sure enough it works. I found a microphone/headset and went about trying to get my computer to learn how I talk by reading some words. It learns as I go along. After a quick training session I was on my way.

Not only can it dictate almost everything I say, but with voice commands I can say File - Print - Okay. And it prints. I'm not saying I'm lazy, but this is like futuristic stuff from "Back to the Future" ya know? In hindsight, I should have spoken this blog into a Word document and copied it over, maybe next time.

For punctation I can say question mark and it inserts a ?!

Oh yeah, the download was free (Word - Tools - Speech). The only thing now is getting it to understand all that I say. Maybe the paid software has a better ability to understand words like "close" which my computer still doesn't 'get'.

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