Friday, October 31, 2008

With Mr Bunches on my lap, it drops to 2 words. Per hour.

Blog while driving, blog without typing -- like, say, if Mr Bunches is sitting on your lap, blog at the same speed you think. That all sounds good to me, especially the last part. I think very quickly. Typing? Not so much. I average about, oh, 3 words per minute. And when you've got a lot to say, that's not so great.

That's why I was so interested in this article I found that says I can Type at 150 WPM for $99!. You can read more by this blogger here, but I've got his whole article below, with permission:





I just watched a great video by Owen the writer for www.u-g-h.com . Owen is a great blogger from the Isle of Man who keeps a couple great tech blogs and even builds plug-ins and widgets in his spare time from what I understand. I've known Owen for over two years now through the blogosphere.

I just finished watching the video Owen created after he agreed to try out Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred. What is really amazing here is that he created this video just a few minutes after he installed the Dragon Naturally Speaking on his machine.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Standard

Many people remember the days when it would take hours if not days or a week or more to train a voice recognition software program. Owen was able to install the software and use it to very good effect as you can see from the video above which has been embedded from YouTube.

Now he's just getting used to the software and one of the things that you will notice is that his speaking style is a little slow and starts and stops a bit in between each sentence. He doesn't have 2 talk that slow nor does he have to start and stop after each sentence. He could just keep talking in one continuous fluid verbal conversation with his computer. Dragon NaturallySpeaking even has the ability to automatically insert punctuation as you talk. The auto punctuation feature is not perfect, but it is a lot better than you might expect.

Owen is actually using the manual punctuation function where he specifically says each item of punctuation that he wants inserted into his sentences and paragraphs.

Regardless, as you watch Owen's video and many other videos out there on Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, you can see just how fast it is and just how useful it can be for anyone that wants to be able to type on their computer and create text by using their voice and speaking to their computer. It's a very liberating experience and as I write this right now I am using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, and I am pacing around my kitchen about 20 feet from my computer using a wireless headset microphone. I walk by my computer every few steps and glance at the screen to see if my computer is capturing the text correctly, but I probably don't even need to do that because it is so very accurate.

That said, it is very important for new users to do a fairly good grammar check on the documents that they create with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. When you first get started, Dragon NaturallySpeaking does learn what you're trying to say and it improves over time. So you will need to edit a little bit more when you first start, and it's a good habit to pick up as you go forward because your speaking style is going to be much different than your normal writing style would be if you were typing with your fingers. It's a different area of the brain and you will get a different result in your written documents when you use Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

This article is approximately 540 words long(pre-edit), and I wrote it in about three minutes. It also took me about two minutes to edit because I was going back and forth into another room to help my kids with their homework. Still, that's approximately 108 words per minute including editing time!

My name is Brett Bumeter and I've been writing about Dragon NaturallySpeaking for almost 2 years now. I think this is a great product, however I also recognize that people really have to see this product in action in order to envision how I can truly help them in their work and in their lives. So I am working to bring many more videos of Dragon NaturallySpeaking to you since you can help figure out if this great tool that costs about $99 could help you type in 150 words a minute. I think it can, and I definitely think it's worth it. You decide and you let me know what you think. :-)

Best regards,
Brett
www.softduit.com

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