I am a professional blogger. I write reviews about products and get a commission if someone buys the product by clicking through a link on my sites. Here’s my disclaimer and here’s what I do to make money by blogging:
- I run my own self hosted WordPress blogs because I find the free software is easy to customize with plug-ins and looks a heck of a lot prettier than blogger or Google sites.
- Although I can type around 90 words per minute, I can speak to my computer around 140 words per minute. I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 Wireless Premium to transcribe my blog posts.
- This post was written using Dragon NaturallySpeaking and it’s my first post using Windows Live Writer. (I really like Windows Live Writer.) After writing over 25 posts with over 34,000 words, I find the speech recognition software gets around 97.2% of my words correct.
I have a secret to tell you. Even though I’ve spent the last year blogging on this site by talking to my computer, I’ve only used a fraction of the features.
It’s March break, so I thought I would take some time to explore some of the other features in Dragon speech software and to see if there’s a better way to do things.
Voice recognition software can help you blog a little quicker
- Part 1 (Tip #1): Today, we’ll look at how I blog with DragonPad
- Part 2 (Tip #2): Next time, we’ll look at how well Dragon NaturallySpeaking works with different programs – web browsers and Microsoft Word / Windows Live Writer.
- Part 3 (Tip #3): Finally, we’ll have a peek at using it with Windows Live Writer.
- Click here to see how many mistakes Dragon NaturallySpeaking made in writing this article.
Here’s how I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to blog:
There’s so much more you could use DNS for… I really just use it to speak to my computer and have it type down what I say.
- I only use the speech recognition part of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I never use commands like “start Microsoft Word“, “tweet that“, or “search the web for aliens“
- I’ve really only used DragonPad (Nuance’s version of Notepad or WordPad.) Up until now I found it a more reliable and easier to blog when using Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
- I use my mouse and my keyboard to click on words and highlight text because it’s faster than using voice commands like “move mouse up,” “MouseGrid nine,” “mouse right-click,” “mouse drag lower right very fast.”
- I do correct the mistakes that Dragon NaturallySpeaking makes (because apparently it improves accuracy,) but I’ve always had around a 97% accuracy rate with Dragon NaturallySpeaking – even as a brand-new user straight out-of-the-box. Here’s my little graph to show the little improvements that I’ve made.
Here’s how I used to write my blog posts using Dragon NaturallySpeaking
Here’s what I used to do:
- I wrote the first draft by dictating into DragonPad using my wireless Bluetooth headset and Dragon NaturallySpeaking. (Sometimes I would use the dictation box, but that’s really meant for shorter passages because you can’t save from the dictation box.)
- After I finished my draft, I would go through it again and fix any transcription errors that I missed the first time. Then, I would do the word counts and figure out how accurate the speech software was for the post.
- Next, I would copy and paste my work into a blog post (Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, etc.) and do some final revisions, including fixing the formatting and adding hyperlinks. If the post was especially long, I would break it up into a series of posts like this one about the new iPad 3 in the classroom or this series about different options for a student response system.
- Finally, I would hit publish and the post would go live.
Why I used DragonPad when dictating with Dragon NaturallySpeaking
After using Dragon software for a year, I developed some biases. I tried dictating directly into the post editor while logged into my WordPress blog, but had a few problems. I felt that things just didn’t work as well with WordPress in a web browser.
- Sometimes there would be extra blank lines
- Sometimes, if I corrected a word in the visual editor, it seems like Internet Explorer would cut one character off each correction. This problem never happened in HTML mode, but it’s hard to edit link for formatting in HTML mode.
- Sometimes, it seems like when I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking with Internet Explorer, it would start to lose track of where I was in the document. For example, I would highlight words and ask Dragon NaturallySpeaking to play them back to me, and it would read back a different part of the sentence.
- Sometimes the transcription seem to take a little bit longer using a web browser compared to dictating directly into DragonPad.
- It just felt like DragonPad was a little bit more accurate.
The next post in this series will be about whether any of these suspicions are actually true.
We’ll look at how well Dragon NaturallySpeaking works in different web browsers and programs: Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome 17, Firefox 10, Microsoft Word, and Windows Live Writer.
Photo Credit: Big Stock Photo: Speedometer – Slow To Insanely Fast Image 5315337
This 3-part series on finding a better way to blog using speech recognition software was written using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 Premium Wireless. What is Dragon NaturallySpeaking?
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