How to use speech to text dictation mode with the Tablet PC |
Loading ...Yesterday while waiting for my wife who was inside Microsoft testing I decided to check out the speech dictation functions on the Tablet PC. I started by launching the tablet input panel and chose the speech tools menu. From there I trained the engine by reading various pieces of text.
Master command: “what can I say?”
Once you get your microphone settings situated the first thing you might want to say is: “What can I say?” This will prompt a window with the different choices, the main ones are highlighted below.
These are the commands available in “dictation” commands:
• New paragraph
• New line
• Spell it
• Spell that
• Spelling mode
To switch between modes, use the dictation or voice command trigger. If you make a mistake in dictation just enter “voice command mode” and say undo that.
These are the commands available in “voice command” mode
• Copy that
• Cut that
• Paste that
• Undo that
Edit during or after?
The main question I have is whether to edit the mistakes during the dictation or after? This post which was made primarily by speech on the Tablet PC took nearly 30 minutes. Keep in mind along the way I was learning how to use the functions that for the most part I had not been using, but that still seems very slow to me. I could have typed this post in a fraction of the time.
To readers who use speech to text regularly for dictation, do you have any tips/tricks to share? If you’ve never used speech-to-text is it because it just took too long and was too clumsy? That’s been the barrier to entry for me although I understand Vista the engine is supposed to get even better. It makes a little more sense on a slate tablet because I can talk faster than I can write, but if the error correction time is factored in, writing and typing remain faster.
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[…] TDavid had a post today on speech recognition. Thought that I would give this a try and make today’s blog entry using a microphone into Microsoft Word and then pull it into BlogDesk. Let’s see how well the speech recognition engine works. So far it looks pretty good, except of course that it got TDavid’s name as “the David”. Not too bad, still going to require some manual edits…tending to agree with TDavid’s assessment that speech recognition is not the fastest way to create a document. Typing in, at least for someone to whom it has become natural, is much quicker. […]
Pingback by Chip’s Quips » Blog Archive » Almost speechless — May 26, 2006 @ 12:20 pm PST
TDavid Gives Speech A Go On His Tablet PC
TDavid is exercising his vocal chords and giving speech recognition a go on his Tablet PC. I don’t know whether speech as input is not used that much on Tablet PCs or just not reported on very much, but if
Trackback by Life On the Wicked Stage: Act 2 — May 26, 2006 @ 1:10 pm PST
I’ve used a number of speech to text programs, although not Microsoft’s, the most reliable (Note: most is highly relative) was Dragon Speak 9. My experience is that they are clumsy, don’t understand the rhythm of human thought, have a limited vocabulary that is annoying to expand, and slip too quickly into editing. I think that the editing problem is one of my chief annoyances. When dictating, I want to create content. I would rather sit down at a keyboard and edit it after creation (I’ve already spent more time editing this post than typing it). My only thought here is that these programs defaults to helping the handicapped replace the keyboard, instead of helping the pacer record his thoughts.
Comment by Bret Myers — May 26, 2006 @ 5:10 pm PST
[…] My Tablet PC already has voice recognization on it and although I like the idea behind this type software, I’ve never been able to get it to work in a practical situation very well. My last serious attempt to use speech recognition (SR) was back in May of this year. It seems I get the energy to try and make speech recognition a couple times a year. […]
Pingback by Testing Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Standard » Make You Go Hmm — December 18, 2006 @ 10:15 pm PST