Speech Recognition:

I was recently asked “how did you add a lengthy posting to your blog”. The person who asked knows that I have almost zero capacity to type. He also knows speaking is difficult for me. I told him I used speech recognition software on my PC. I will attempt to explain how I benefit and some of the difficulties.

My iPad and my iPhone both have Siri enabled. The bottom line on Siri is that is not very useful for people in my condition. One is required to hold the home button down to enact Siri. Siri is not very smart and misunderstands almost everything said. One annoying example is that I will ask it to open Kindle, and e-book software. I know I don’t speak the best but Siri hears open Kendall. Then Siri tells me I have no application named that and do I want to look for it in the app store. Now I am stuck with Siri open and I must hit the button again to close Siri.

In one recent iOS update one feature was added for Siri. You are supposed to be able to engage Siri by saying to the device “Hey Siri… And then the request”. You also must have the device on a power cable at the time for it to work. I have an iPad on a swingarm and it is plugged into power all the time. Unfortunately the hey Siri feature only works about half the time. I end up yelling at my iPad and still no Siri. Sometimes it engages hey Siri for no apparent reason. Again when Siri engages I must push the home button to disengage. I have tried saying cancel Siri but that does not work. Siri also seems pretty touchy. When Siri functions incorrectly I mutter things like “stupid Siri”. Of course Siri hears this and expresses hurt feelings. Poor Siri!

So the answer the question of how I add to my blog – is that I use my PC, Microsoft Word and a speech recognition software named Dragon Naturally Speaking. I acquired a newer PC earlier this year so that I could open a blog. The software works much much better than Siri. The biggest advantage in the software is that I can correct mistakes in spelling and grammar. It still requires that I noticed them so some make it into my “writing”. As I learned to use this software I can dictate in Microsoft Word almost totally hands-free. I tell the software to correct a certain word and it brings up a list of words that I may want to substitute. If my word is not on the list I can say “spell that” and I can tell it letter by letter how to spell the word I want. This makes it so much more functional than speech recognition on my Apple devices.

I transcribe my blog posts in Microsoft Word. That I am able to do a few voice commands to copy my writing. I can then open my blog manually and paste in what I have written. I can add the title by voice but it won’t capitalize things correctly. I must do that in Microsoft Word, then cut it from my file and then paste it into the heading. Same thing when I share it on Facebook. If I don’t cut and paste then there are no capitals. Some days I have the strength to correct this and other days I just let it ride.

My only complaint about the software Dragon Naturally Speaking is that – I thought when I purchased the latest version it would be smart enough that I could run my PC hands-free. This is not turned out to be the case. I can still control the mouse and mouse clicking by voice but I can’t say commands and have it actuate them. When I was still working I used Windows XP and added a previous version of Dragon Naturally Speaking. I could control and dictate to any Microsoft product and it would understand the menu commands as they spoke them.

This current version with Windows 8 does not function as well. Strangely the voice commands work a little bit in Facebook. I can say mouse commands and things like page up page down. All of a sudden though this function ceases in the Facebook app and I must use the mouse pad on the PC. I can only do this for short while. My pointer finger just quits responding and curls up. If I rest for a while it will come back for short periods of time like to close my PC and shut it down.

With all this technology it seems to me that the speech recognition software and the PC would work better now than it two years ago. I’m afraid Dragon software is going direction where they want to be useful for specific industries like medical transcription. Their development for disabled people seems to have gone away. Oh well, is it is what it is and I find I can still function better than I could without it.