I just installed Nuance Dragon Dictate 2.0 to my Mac. And this is my first piece of text I am writing with it. I’m using the internal microphone off my MacBook Pro. The quality of microphone is not good enough. This is not easy to begin with. I’m going to teach myself to use this.
I do not speak English as my first language. So I do have a pretty strong accent. Another thing I figured out is that I’m just used to the process off typing text. Usually when you are talking to another person the lot of information is transmitted using your voice and gestures in addition to plain text you speak.
I’m pretty confident that after using this application for a while I’m going to get far more productive in text input. When you want to enter text by speaking it doesn’t feel comfortable in the beginning. You tend to add sentences you really didn’t mean to. It would be interesting to take this after next level by adding some gesture recognition for unwanted text.
One of the reasons I think this will be a huge productivity gain for me is the fact that, I just don’t like typing. Knowing the fact that I don’t need to type everything down anymore feels inspiring. Maybe I would be able to type in blog post while driving a car. Maybe it would be possible to use this tech to make an email app that I could use while driving the car without losing my sight to traffic. Maybe someone already did it.
Dragon Dictate costs US$179 and it is about 1.5 GB package to download. In case this will motivate me to be productive for couple of extra hours I will be happy. I’m pretty confident that at least native English speakers will gain a lot from this software. In my native language, Finnish there is no dictation software available. Therefore I cannot estimate how well this would work with a better skill of spoken language.
