Today is one of those rare days that I have no meetings. And also happens to be a day that Paula needs to spend time getting ready for a house guest. Finney is a good dog but he can be kind of needy. To free up Paula I brought Finney into the office
For one complication was sneaking Finney into the office, however, is that when he is in new situations he gets nervous and whines a lot. Now, sneaking a dog into the office doesn’t work very well if the dog is making a lot of noise. The way to keep a nervous Finney quiet is to continuously pet him. While petting him keeps him quiet, my hands are unable to do any typing. Sounds like a good reason to try out speech recognition.
It may be my microphone, or it may just be that I need to do more training of the speech recognition, but my initial use has been slow going. I’ve been using speech recognition to type this blog post, and I find that it is taking me three times as long as it would take if I were typing. I can touch type and and fairly accustomed to putting my thoughts down directly from brain to fingers. Part of the delay, I am finding, is expressing my thoughts in this new manner. If I stare at the screen waiting for my words to appear, I’m brain just freezes. There is a significant delay between voicing a word and having it appear on the screen. For the touch typist who is used to seeing the output immediately on the screen it is distracting to have to pause ones stream of consciousness while waiting for the computer to interpret your words.
I also find if I speak too quickly the computer will run my words together to form similar sounding words. This is usually frustrating as it requires frequent editing of the sentence is high and have just dictated. Most commonly the errors are in the form of incorrect words but it gets even more frustrating when the dictation is incorrectly interpreted as commands to the program (it has tried several times to close this blog post prematurely). It does, however, provide some amount of amusement when it makes errors like taking ” down directly” and turning it into ” downed rectally.”
As I struggle through, however, I find that through a combination of training the speech recognition engine and training Reeves, I am getting better at am using text to speech. I wonder if I’ll ever get to the point where I can speak naturally to the computer and have it be acceptably accurate.