Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Monday, November 26, 2012

Using Apple Dictate -voice recognition revisited


With the new mountain lion operating system, Apple Computer has supplied a built in voice recognition program called Apple dictate. This particular blog post is mostly being written with Apple dictate. I have made no corrections to the text so any of the words that are wrong came from the program. I am putting any corrections and brackets so you can see the problems with the dictation. I also added some spaces and periods and corrected some upper case letters. One of the problems that I see is that the text does not appear as you dictate but only as you finish a segment of dictation. The program relies on an online connection to Apple computer to do the actual voice to text conversion. Or is also a 32nd [30 second] limit to the amount of dictation that you can do before transcribing.

Over the years, the ultimate in computer assisted voice recognition would be full recognition with 100% accuracy. From time to time, I have tried different programs to see how close they come to this goal. Unfortunately, in most cases and every time in the past. I have found that the programs were cranky or buggy and lack the ability to transcribe common phrases accurately. It ended up taking more time to dictate then [than] it did to type the dictation manually. If you have a physical limitation or typing is very difficult for you, then it may be advantageous to try a voice recognition program.

Actually, the Apple dictate program is doing a fairly good job of transcribing the text that I am dictating. Although the 32nd [30 second] time limit is very inconvenient. The program would work for short short [words repeated requiring editing] notes and other of other [more words repeated, there is a tendency to repeat when dictating] things requiring only a small amount of dictation, but if you wanted to use this program to make a longer dictation it becomes very inconvenient to stop every 30 seconds.

Before I began using computers extents [extensively], I use [used] to dictate a lot of my legal briefs. However the correction process was so lengthy and painful that when I got computer access I immediately stopped doing voice dictation. If you rely on voice recognition software for writing blog posts or articles for publication, you have to do a great deal of careful editing in order to pick up all of the misused words and problems with punctuation. I don't think that I would use Apple Dictate regularly because it would drive me crazy. But I am incentivized to try another upgrading my existing voice recognition software, and perform another test of the voice recognition capabilities. It may be just possible that voice recognition software has reached a level where it can be a useful tool especially if you are writing thousands of words a week. Actually, the program didn't do too bad of a [edited out extraneous words] job in transcribing my speech especially if I spoke slowly and carefully.

If you have an app [Apple] computer, running Mountain [L]ion, you can turn on Apple dictate from the system's preferences [System Preferences]. The program is started by hitting the function parens FM parens [(fn)] key twice. I will report back when I get the new program, if that's what happens.

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