Digital Media Minute

In this short series on voice-activated typing software, I started by going over my initial thoughts on whether or not I needed it, as well as my hesitation because of the price. I also had serious doubts about voice-recognition typing because “keyboard recognition typing” had worked for me for 20 years, albeit uncomfortably. As someone who does not touch type I had to ask myself if the neck and shoulder stiffness that I feel after half an hour of hunt-and-peck might go away if I simply decided to learn once and for all…

I did go ahead and buy MacSpeech Dictate despite my reservations and I’ve been very, very happy that I did. It was one of those things that, once I spent the money, all the abstract doubts about getting it in the first place faded away. It is just so much easier now to write. I find that banging out 500 or 1000 words is so painless and easy physically that I am able to explore thoughts verbally with ease, undistracted. I don’t know how much money that is worth to me, but I have a feeling that over the course of years it’s going to be a lot more than the $170 or so that I spent on the software.

I also cannot say honestly whether or not it’s improved the quality of my writing-in the end I seem to spend as much time as ever editing to make something with which I am happy. Even the editing process though is handled verbally (very well I might add), so that painstaking attention to detail doesn’t mean painful attention to detail in the form of back spaces, deletes and minor edits in a process that always seems to give me a headache after about an hour.

I had a small epiphany when I tried to use the software without the included headset as it was clumsy and a minor inconvenience, in my opinion. To my surprise, the results seem to be exactly the same, at least in the case of a voice-recognition typing software I’m using.

So I have one more thing to add now that I’ve had this dictation software for a few weeks. The method that I have found works best for me is to not look at the screen at all as I speak. I force myself to go for five or 10 minutes at a time just talking. Waiting for the text to catch up with your voice leads to going back and making small corrections and breaking the flow of your thoughts. Not only does this draw out the process, it’s not necessary. My fear initially that mis-typing by the software could leave me with a bunch of gibberish, unable to reconstruct my thoughts. I found that this is not a problem. Speaking whole sentences at a time actually leads to much better voice recognition by the software so that there are fewer corrections, and it also allows your thoughts to flow more naturally. So that’s the point this final little post on voice-recognition typing. In the end, simply trusting the software to follow you instead of making any allowances are all (except speaking reasonably clearly, of course) is both easier for you and helps the software achieve maximum accuracy.

I’ve been using MacSpeech Dictate for a week now and I have two things to report that I didn’t know when I did my initial review of this voice activated typing software.

On about day three I was sitting while holding the headset that is included with the Dictate software as I spoke into it. (I wore the headset on my head for about a day until I got tired of the way it felt and simply started holding it like a microphone.) I had read reviews of dictate that warned that the MacBook Air default microphone was not of high enough quality to run voice recognition software, so I had not even tried to use it without the headset.

Well lo and behold I removed the headset from the USB port and started talking again and I saw no difference at all in my results. It was a quiet afternoon in my room with only the sound of the air conditioner as ambient noise. Still I was surprised: I spoke no louder and at the same speed.

So what difference does this make? Well since I’m using this voice recognition typing software in conjunction with an ultra-portable laptop, my little content creation machine just got a little more portable. Less to carry, faster to set up. The whole experience is cleaner. If the computer is sleeping I simply open it, hit one button and start talking. As rarely as I’m hit by inspiration I can’t afford to fool around.

By the way I haven’t changed any of the default microphone settings to try and improve the performance of the software. Indoors, when it’s quiet, I haven’t really had to. Now that I don’t have to wear an obnoxious headset while I’m dictating I feel more inclined than I did before to see how this works in public, in a reasonably quiet place I assume.

Is this such a big victory when the end product is no more than I could create by typing? It’s probably too early for me to really judge whether writing this way produces content that is of a different quality than I create when I’m typing, good or bad. But my initial feeling is that it is a lot less effort to write this way, and I don’t just mean physically. On some subjects it’s very easy to just talk and talk quite easily, and I have never had so little barrier between thinking and getting words down as I do now. As someone who does not touch type I can’t say that the ease of speaking isn’t matched by the quick competence of a touch typist for whom typing is akin to breathing. I can say that not having to sweat over getting a thought down before I forget it is a huge improvement, for me. The process of getting it all down feels practically unmediated, with no pen, keyboard or anything else involved.

With voice typing software I suppose I am seeing the actual speed at which I can create, as the process now happens via an entirely unobtrusive technology. It’s the speed at which I can talk. If the keyboard has always been a bottleneck for my thoughts, I am pretty sure I don’t think any faster than I can speak. For me there is something that feels like liberation in all this.