Training my Dragon

This is the first time that I write a blog post without using my fingers.
Come to think of it, this is the first time for a very long time that I write a blog post (Apologies!). "Writing" actually feels like the wrong word here, but I suppose that it must be relevant in this case (wait for it...).

About two weeks ago, I bought a new toy. After seeing this article and video, I was convinced that the technology of speech recognition had not only finally "arrived", but had also reached a price level that could entice me to give it a go (Thank you, Amazon.co.uk!).

So, here I sit, using my voice, a headset, and the speech recognition software called "Dragon NaturallySpeaking". I say something, and amazingly enough, Dragon seems to understand what I'm saying well enough to turn it into type. I'm not speaking unnaturally slowly or syllable by syllable, as you might imagine that you would have to with an automated telephone service. I'm actually impressed, because even if I'm yammering on fairly quickly it seems to be picking up everything I say. (whoo, it understood the word yammering!).

The only thing is, that the whole process is rather mindbending, not to mention tongue twisting. For one thing, I have to say the words "comma" and "period" out loud, which is not a natural thought process. I actually have to think about what I want to say before I say it, which is not a natural thought process. I have to avoid run-on sentences and going off on tangents (which I normally do using parentheses, as you may have noticed). Just using the parentheses is breaking my brain, because I have to say the words "open-paren" and "close-paren" before and after every tangent. Heck, even using quotation marks means that I have to say out loud, "open-quote" and "close-quote". Like in the last sentence, where I literally had to say "open-quote open hyphen quote close quote and close-quote open hyphen quote close quote". I know, it's not a natural thought process.

So far, I have been able to generate this entire text only by speaking. Including a few fixes, some of which were especially needed for the last paragraph which nearly drove me nuts. All things considered, I'm pretty impressed.

What I'm hoping for is that this will be a timesaver for whenever I have to write in the future. I once did a Facebook test, telling me how quickly I type, and the rather disappointing result was approximately 40 words per minute. This is about one third of the words I am able to speak in that same minute. So if you do the math, it appears fairly intuitive that it would save me time to speak instead of typing, which I am fairly bad at.

However, only time will tell if switching my brainpower from my fingertips to the tip of my tongue is going to be a timesaver. Especially now that I have to think about what I say first, before I say it. Also, this constant enunciation of punctuation marks will take some getting used to -- and will probably either come naturally to me within a week, or drive me absolutely bonkers.