A friend introduced me to the amazingly fast and accurate speech-to-text software called Dragon Naturally Speaking. As a frequent blogger I was smitten by this time-saving if not labor-saving wonder. I got a Dragon of my own, and have been training him to recognize my Delaware dialect for the better part of a week. He’s getting right snappy!
But I want to speak to him untethered from my computer. I want to be able to dictate on a walk through the park, or at 3 o’clock in the morning, prone. I’ve found a way. I dictate to my very portable Olympus LS-10 battery-operated digital recorder , save the sound file and feed it to my Dragon later, via a 3 foot length of 3.5 mm cable, stretched between the earphone port of the LS-10 to the mike-in port of my computer. I tell my Dragon “wake up! Start listening!”. And he does. Then I push the play button on my LS-10, the file plays, and in a few moments Dragon has made beautiful text of the meal.
Eureka! This works even with recordings from my old portable cassette recorder. If you have a smart cell phone with a recording app and an earphone port, you could use that like I’m using my LS-10.
I invite you to speak to your dragon untethered. Be free! A writer on the go, who speaks and makes words later.
Mark Twain confesses in his voluminous autobiography that he regrets not hiring a capable stenographer much earlier in his long career. He would have loved my Dragon!
Were you able to do this using the home edition of Dragon Natural Speaking or did you need to only use the Premium edition. Thanks
I was able to do it using the Home edition.
When i read about the tool, i discovered that it has to recognize your voice through voice recognition and am surprised to read that it can write from a recording. My question is, have you used any other voice tool or software to engender your voice being recognized or, any recording outside your voice can still be transcribed?
I will like to know more because, voice recognition has been the reason i looked the other way… Thanks TCDavis
It seemed to me that factors which might affect voice recognition might include the following: 1) the unique overtones of a speaker’s voice 2) the unique accent of a speaker 3) the unique intonation of a speaker (the way his/her voice rises and falls, and 4) the customary pacing of a speaker.
Now, it also seemed to me that a recording device would not likely alter any of the last three factors. So the question remained whether a lack of fidelity of the recording device might prevent the unique overtones to be conveyed. My experiment with both a digital field recorder and even a cassette tape recorder indicate that neither device significantly alters overtones. So, either may be used to record speeches, and these may be played into Dragon. Dragon digests them just as successfully as if one were speaking with the recommended strut microphone. No extra software is needed to make this work.