Who Else Talks To Their Blog?

I've now been using Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) voice technology to dictate blog posts for some months. The system has slowly become more used to my British accent and now performs reasonably well. However there are still some minor irritations and I wondered whether others had found solutions to them.

One of them is that you can train the system and teach it words that it should recognize. The only word that creates a problem is the word of. Actually I'm dictating this using DNS and as usual it displayed off. Somehow I cannot get this one right. I have trained it on the single word 'of' but it seemed to have no effect.

Another thing is that occasionally it will guess a phrase I have used and get it completely wrong. If you then mark this with your mouse, it will show you what other alternatives it might have used. So often I find that item 2 or 3 is exactly what I thought I was saying and yet the system produced something entirely different as a first guess. Does anyone have an answer for that?

I am using a fairly cheap microphone and I have wondered whether upgrading might improve the total performance. Again I would be interested in others' reactions to that.

Overall I'm a pretty happy camper. This whole Forum post is something I am dictating as I think. .. and mostly DNS got it right first time.

Is anyone else using this or other voice technology and how do they rate it?

 

That's a mistake. Buy a tested Microphone from their list, then retrain Dragon. The difference is Amazing.

I use a Plantronics USB DSP 400 headset. You just plug it into your USB port. I think it was about $45.

The only downside is it tangles. I also use a SoundMax approved microphone for when I do not want to wear the headset.

 

Is there a way to do formatting as well through dictating?or that's done after dictating the whole post?

 

That seems like a cheap way to do it. I've seen the software used before, it works but it's not the same as blogging. I would rather write my articles, as that's how people are going to read them. They won't listen to my voice speaking the articles I've written, so why should I speak it and have it written?