Yesterday, I got a new toy. It is called Dictate from MacSpeech and its speech recognition from Mac OS X. so today, I have decided to write a dialogue, or should I say speak a clog.
I am not going to make any edits or corrections to what the software detects as my voice. Sir everything on the screen will actually be what I have said, were at least the software’s interpretation of what I said. So when I installed the software it basically said that they had to train the software to my voice at ramming through a five-minute storytelling process. All I had to do was read a story that appeared on the screen. Apparently the software would recognize what I was saying and adapt to my voice pattern. And the more I use this software is the more accurate it becomes however you can tell that there are still quite a few little errors appearing from time to time.
People here in the office have asked me why I’m bothering spending the time with this new technology. Well, yesterday morning was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. One of our partners in China sent me an e-mail that required a significant and lengthy response to ensure that all the details and content was accurate and not confusing. I ended up spending about one hour typing a document that was in my head. In other words, I knew what I needed to write I just needed to type it and put it on the screen. In all it would have been over 1000 words. Afterwards I realised that I just wasted a full hour typing a document that would have taken about 10 minutes on a telephone call to convey verbally. One of the other guys here in the office is an author and he swears by DragonDictate for writing his books. After his encouragement and goading I decided it would be worth my time up front for a longer term benefit.
Considering the fact that our reply to about 250 e-mails a day, I honestly believe that accurate dictation software would really speed up the way they do business. I suppose even with the edits that I would need to make to a real story or e-mail that I was writing it would take me that long to go back through and make some grammar and punctuation corrections. Obviously, reading back through this now, I can see that the software has made a few mistakes. I have to say no considering I only started using it yesterday it’s doing pretty well, even if it doesn’t understand is that the common words like the abbreviation for Web log.
I can only type at about 40-45 words per minute so even if this thing does create a few errors that I have to edit, I am still well in front.
I love technology, systems and all other practices that make businesses more productive and efficient. I have a feeling that by the time the software has properly adapted to my voice pattern (or I have learnt to speak properly) it will be more accurate, faster and a lot more reliable to use than to actually type documents and e-mail is. Maybe in a few weeks I will do another sample of text just to see if the software has improved its accuracy to make it an even better business tool.
By the way — this block of text only took me about 2 1/2 minutes to speak and would have taken me at least 15 minutes or maybe even 20 to type.