Dictation Software to Save the Day (I hate typing!)
I don't know about you but I hate typing. I am just not very good at it. Despite 30 odd years of tapping away at a keyboard, I am still not much better than I was when I first started!
Yet typing is so integral to daily life that I need to keep marching on...
In a quest to forgo (or at least reduce) my typing woes, I have started to tinker with dictation software, to see if this can help me work more productively. There is quite a nice plug-in for Gmail that seems to work okay, plus Google voice-typing is so-so - more geared toward the US market I think, as I find the punctuation almost impossible to work (!).
Windows 10 has speech recognition built-in and that seems to be quite a good solution. I've had a little bit of a play with it although there are certain aspects there are quite frustrating and it seems to have some of the drawbacks of Google voice-typing around punctuation instructions.
Right now I am dictating using the Dragon software. This by all accounts seems to be the premium solution, and yes it comes with a premium price! I am just trialling it at the moment to see whether it is worth the investment, but so far it seems to be doing a pretty good job.
Typing and communicating using PCs and phones is so important today, so I do think that a solution like this could work for the longer term. One drawback that I would have to be able to get over is dictating to my phone in public - might feel a bit strange and a tad embarrassing. Although I have no doubt I will get over it in the long term.
Dictating also has the added benefit of allowing you to write 'more as you speak'. Advice often goes along the lines of: to write better, you need to write as you speak. Yet when sat at a keyboard, the tapping of the keys sometimes makes the wording come out more like typed words rather than the spoken word (so the sentiment gets lost). I will have to see if this plays out in that way for me.
Anyway, I will keep trying different software and to find one that works for me. But in the meantime Dragon does seem like a pretty good option and I will be exploring it further over the coming days and weeks.
If you have any suggestions for dictation software, please drop them in the comments below.
[P.S. I exported the above post from Dragon with the bare minimum of alts needed. Respect where respect is due!]
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