Take the slog out of blogging

Most people will agree that the most onerous part of blogging or article writing is the chore involved in typing the article, editing and correcting it for submission. Most people involved in writing articles have no trouble coming up with ideas and visualizing the outline, but reducing it all to writing takes a great deal of time.

When writing articles or producing the blog for affordable self catering accommodation establishment, I use speech recognition software which makes the whole task enjoyable and so much easier. I am surprised to find how little is written on the Internet about the successful use of speech recognition for writing or blogging. In fact,  the general consensus seems to be that it is a waste of time to even try it.

I had many years of useful assistance out of Microsoft office 2003 which has great speech recognition capability. One of the problems that I had to overcome, however, was the fact that it comes only with an American accent and does not cater to people who speak with different accents. Nevertheless I got by for several years by learning to pronounce certain words such as “fast” and “tomato” with a USA accent. The great thing about the software, however, was that you can train the computer to recognize words that might be present in your language that are not recognised in the USA.

When I upgraded to MS office 2007, I was surprised to find that speech recognition was no longer included.  Although it is now available as part of VISTA, I did some research to find voice recognition software that would be independent of the office installation and found that Nuance’s Dragon “ Naturally Speaking 10 “ seem to be the best available. Having installed the software has really made my article writing and blogging successful;  with an unbelievably high rate of speed and accuracy. One of the great benefits of Dragon is that it comes with a choice of accents, one of which is the UK English, which works for me. There are also South East Asian and Indian English versions.

This article does not attempt to provide instructions for setting up your speech or voice recognition software in MS Office or Dragon. You will find this information on the relevant websites or in the instructions with the software. Here are some pointers based on experience that will help you  make best use of it.

Firstly, you need a fair amount of computing capacity. Installing the files takes a few GB, and as you use the software it builds up voice files which also become quite large. The first thing is to get yourself a good quality headset; experience shows that the highest level of accuracy is obtained if you have a USB voice recognition headset. This is the type that has only one earpiece with the band across the head. I do use a headset with the regular twin jack plugs at work though and it is only marginally less accurate.

The next step is to train the software. It can be installed and set up to operate with the minimum of training,  but your accuracy will suffer. The training is simple; one just has to set up your microphone by letting the computer adjust the volume, after which training consists of reading from a variety of texts that are presented. The variety allows one to choose the most suitable for a specific type of content or blog,  but also gives a variety of contexts for the computer to recognize. Take the time to read a number of training sessions even if you do not have the patience to do them all at once. It will make an big difference to the accuracy with which the software recognizes what you are saying.  Dragon’s software can be tasked to scan your existing files in “My Documents” as well as your mail in Outlook to build up information about the your writing style and vocabulary to ensure a high degree of accuracy.

Nuance claims that most people type than average of 35 words a minute with only 58% accuracy, but speak 120 words a minute. Only those with truly proficient typing skills are likely to be able to type more than 100 words a minute. It is truly great to be able to lean back in your chair, relaxed and ready to create, and just talk to your computer as if you were talking to a friend. As you talk, you will see the type appearing in a steady stream in your application.  There is more good news- you can use voice recognition software in almost every application, from Word through Excel, and in mail applications such as Outlook and even your Gmail. If you are in business,  just imagine how much more efficient  it will be to simply talk your response to an e-mail and forwarded  the reply within minutes.

You do need to edit your work after dictation  and one should beware of becoming too confident about the software accuracy, so take the time to read it through before you hit the “send”  or the “save”  button. The kind of errors that may occur are usually because of annunciation such  that the software types for example  “owner is” instead of “onerous”, or “I scream “ instead of “ice cream”, One needs to annunciate your words clearly to get the highest degree of accuracy and to speak in a normal and continuous flow.

Perhaps you will suddenly find improved productivity with speech recognition software to produce more and more exciting articles.