Sometime ago I bought Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which are used extensively with Word for work documents. Since the advent of Vista, I haven't yet had a chance to use dictation to create text. Of course Windows Vista comes with its own speech to text abilities, but there is nothing in the world that is quite as good as the Nuance product.

Recently I received an e-mail from them with an offer to upgrade to the latest version 9.5 which apparently works with both Windows Vista and the new Office 2007. So here I am again, trying to use my voice to create text in the vain hope that will prove a lot quicker than typing.

There are obvious advantages to using a voice to create text. Firstly, the obvious advantage is that you speak a lot quicker than you can type. Of course, it helps that every word that appears on the page is already correctly spelt. Even now, with less than five minutes of training, I am achieving 97% accuracy. Finally, you can record your blog posts onto Windows Mobile device and then transcribe them into Windows Live Writer once you are back in the office or at your computer. This enables you to bring the immediacy of your blog posting to wherever you are even if you don't have access to a computer at the time. I'm hoping this will increase the frequency of my blog posting as well. :)

Yes it does take a little that getting used to:

• The idiosyncrasies of my South African/English/Australian accent mean that some words are ever so slightly misinterpreted. :)
• Navigating around the page takes some getting used to, and in the beginning it is very tempting to use your keyboard and mouse rather than the spoken word. He had to rethink this. Wear the pain and frustration and take the time to learn the new behaviour. This will make you much quicker in the end.
• Besides actually learning new commands, the computer often misinterprets commands for text and vice versa. So it's pretty important to make sure you know what words you can use as commands. Take the time to use tutorials.
• It often seems that things are taking a lot longer in the beginning but actually looking at the length of this blog already even with all the corrections it probably took slightly less time to speak it rather than to type it.
• One change is that you tend to speak a lot more than you would type. So proofreading and editing become paramount.

 R42