After a while you more or less get used to the trials and tribulations of "typing" with voice recognition software. My particular beast is Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Tonight I managed to waste a chunk of time with it, though. I was shuffling some papers around on my desk (and mayhaps breathing too loudly), and I glanced back to the screen to see a bunch of gobbly gook along with those little paragraph and indentation symbols showing. I started hitting ctrl-z (undo), and it seemed to be taking forever, so I just closed the file (I hadn't typed anything intentionally yet). Then when I went back to open the file, low and behold, the paragraph and indent symbols were still there, littering my screen like a bowl of spilt popcorn on a freshly vacuumed rug.
After spending about 5 minutes poking through my menus and trying to figure out what command would terminate them, I resorted to searching through MS Word's help file. An exercise in futility. I found nothing about the symbols, much less how to turn them off. I finally resorted to the web. Eventually I discovered you can turn off these obnoxious arrows and paragraph signs by typing CTRL-* (How Dragon "heard" Control Asterisk from me shuffling papers and breathing, I don't know). Total wasted time? 12 minutes. And then another 10 to complain about it in a certain blog. :)
The lesson of this late night rant? When using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, always always use the "stop listening" command when you're going to pause in your work, shuffle papers, or otherwise breathe vigorously.
Leaving Dragon NS "unattended" can give some funky results as well! A few years ago my office was testing a GN Netcom Voice Array microphone and I noticed it was... shall we say ultra-sensitive. So I set the array up to just listen to the background and what a mess of junk it picked up!
Posted by: Aldark | July 27, 2005 at 08:35 AM
I was interested to come across your post about your experience with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
How are you getting on with it now. If you're getting on OK, great, if not, all I can say is stick at it as you should be getting 95% accuracy within a short space of time.
I've published some hints and tips on Dragon including tips for achieving good recognition accuracy at www.speechempoweredcomputing.co.uk/Newsletter.
Peter
www.speechempoweredcomputing.co.uk
Posted by: Peter Maddern | June 13, 2006 at 07:38 AM