You’re better off just dictating words and not trying to operate your computer with your voice. So don’t worry about making mistakes when dictating. But mistakes inspire creativity, because they beg you to fix them.
Your first transcription may not be smooth or free of mistakes. Talk around any blatant mistakes – restate anything that’s unclear but keep dictating. Don’t stop to fix typos or punctuation errors. Keep a consistent flow, where words come out of your mouth at approximately the same speed they come into your mind. We maintained a cheerful tone as we worked, but we weren’t dramatic.
I did a stint as a professional voice transcriptionist, repeating the speech of another person more clearly so that Dragon could understand it better. It doesn’t appreciate or even recognize histronics.
Shouting, whispering or pretending you’re Robin Williams will make the software work harder. Keep a consistent tone, speed, and volume.Don’t worry about polluting your masterpiece with synonyms – it’s probably faster than hemming and hawing for the perfect word. Or you may be able to train Dragon (and yourself) that you pronounce “to” as “tu” and “too” as “te-yoo.” Or restate your sentence in different words. In that case, I can usually dictate the correct word again, perhaps preceding it with “or rather” as a newscaster might. I can handle Dragon spelling “to” instead of “too” or “member” instead of “remembering.” But sometimes the software provides a perfectly spelled word that would make no sense later. If there are any errors or omissions, you want to make sure they’re not so serious that you can’t remember what you really meant to say. Yes, you need to pause while you think, but you don’t need to keep talking while you do it. Pausing between phrases is also a good habit for public speaking, or for speaking in general, for that matter.
It likes to sense the sentence structure as you speak. Separating parts of speech with pauses (“It was… the… best of… times”) can really confuse the software. That’s mostly what I just said, but it bears repeating. I can sometimes see my software rewrite a sentence once I’ve completed it, because it now has more of the context and so can recognize more of the words. Recent advances in accuracy have come not so much from speech recognition (“that’s a buh not a duh”) as from language recognition (“after the words ‘eat’ or ‘peel’ the sounds ‘buh nah nuh’ are probably ‘banana’).
Today the error rate of speech recognition software has improved to within a percentage point of a human being. That’s one reason why more writers are choosing to dictate their books. With speech recognition software, some writers can add several thousand. Writing with Speech Recognition Software By MichaelĪ professional writer might add a thousand words a day to their rough draft.