Mod's I wasn't sure if I should put this in the computer section or not and in a moment of indecision I posted it here. Please feel free to move it as you see fit, Thanks.
I like to write, I didn’t say I was good at it, just that I liked to do it. Writing keeps me occupied and my Dr. tells me it’s therapeutic. As I may have mentioned before I have a degenerative neurological disorder, it’s progressive and incurable. As time goes on I have noticed that my ability to write is being affected by my disease. Although I am still able to formulate ideas and stories without much difficulty something is getting lost between my head and the keyboard. The result is often a group of unorganized sentences which make very little sense. I don’t have any control over what’s happening, it just sort of happens.
The severity of this problem varies from day to day, some days are good, some are not so good. As a result of this it takes me a very long time to put together a short story or a long post, that is if I want it to make any sense. It can take several hours or it may continue on to the next day. It just depends on what kind of day I am having and how long the story is.
I was thinking that there has to be a way to deal with this problem. I have heard about voice recognition software and thought this might be a solution. So if we want to find out about a certain thing, we head to the internet, pick a search engine and press on, I like Google. My search for voice recognition software delivered literally thousands of results. I picked a few of the most promising ones and went to those sites. I finally narrowed it down to a site that had a bunch of reviews that covered the most popular brands of the software I was looking for. Some even had video tutorials which were very helpful. After quite a bit of reading one brand stood out, it was Dragon “naturally speaking†voice recognition software. It had the best accuracy and the most features of any of the other programs. I thought that I may have found a solution to my problem.
Just by chance I scrolled down past the end of the reviews. What I found was a comment section where readers could make observations or give opinions. After reading several of the comments I found one that was very interesting. The person making the comment stated that along with the software mentioned in the reviews that Windows seven had a voice recognition program attached to it and that he had tried it and it worked very well. So I’m thinking, what the hell. I have windows seven why not give it a try? Up to this point I had no idea that a voice recognition program was bundled with windows, surprise, surprise.
I did a search, found the program and ran the setup. I already had a microphone, it was part of the web cam I had just purchased to use with Skype. As you might expect set up was a piece of cake and there was even a video tutorial on how to work the program. Everything was pretty simple to operate and I printed out a voice command cheat sheet that was provided. It is going to take some practice to get used to working with the program and a little work to remember the voice commands. Even though my memory is sketchy because of my ailment I still have the cheat sheet to fall back on if need be. I have no idea what the future may hold but for now I think I’ve found a solution to my problem. Besides that windows just saved me $99.00.
I have already used the program to write a post that I made earlier and it worked very well. Writing the entire post took me about ¼ of the time it would have normally taken. It’s like I said it’s going to take some practice but I think it will work out. This post was put together using the program as well.
Just for general info the program also works with other applications not just word. You can open and close programs, do file maintenance, surf the web, lots of stuff it is pretty flexible.
