Speech to Text
I have played with this before but has never been as good as it is currently.  This afternoon, after a friend was showing me the text to speech capabilities on his new cell phone I decided I wanted to revisit this on my windows machine at home. I had seen several indications in various reviews that suggested the new speech to text program in Windows 7.0 is the bomb. I am not disappointed. As a matter of fact, I currently sit here feet propped on the desk, had set on hands behind my hand, writing this log entry.
This is something I have been wanting to try for a while, as often I’m occupied with other things while I’m blocking. Yes but does mean I am truly a multi-tasker and that on occasion I will be prone to mistakes. However thick ease at which I can now create block in trees almost as fast as my mind will allow me more than makes up for the extra effort in editing that will be required.
I was greatly concerned about the interface into web-based schools such as WordPress and the editor contained was in the program. While I will admit there are some minor issues for the most part including text is pretty straightforward and works as one would expect. There is definitely a learning curve, but it is not insurmountable.
There are some minor things with the editor that one has to overcome. For instance, it is my inclination to set a new paragraph to start a new paragraph. However if you do this in the insert window for the editor here on WordPress it will give you a double blank line entry. It seems instead you have to say new line.
One does have to be careful with the process. Based on my own experience while composing this block entry, I had several paragraphs in the insertion box that I accidentally deleted. I’m not sure exactly what process I used to do that however I know I did it. I’m sure as I learn more of the process and how to control it I will be more able to avoid such simple mistakes in the future.
When I started this experiment, I had a great deal of concern about how well into the WordPress editor would work. Those concerns seem to be mis-founded, as the insertion of text through speech seems to work fairly well, except of course noting my mistake above. There is of course that learning curve involved, but once you get past that it goes pretty smoothly.
I am now anxious to try things such as inserting photos and videos into my blood post in the correct locations. Much more to learn in that process in order to be successful with that. I also believe that I could set categories and tag words using the speech to text software, however I believe that those processes are still going to be more efficient to use quick mouse clicks and keyboard.
By the way, if you are curious yourself, the text to speech programs are included in Windows 7.0 and there are versions available in Windows XP. I strongly recommend that you start with the YouTube video below, which gives some insight as to how it works and then you should proceed through the speech to text tutorial included in the control panel where you turn on the option for speech to text. Note that it does not require any specialized software or additional purchases to make it work excepting a higher quality microphone, preferably in a headset configuration, which most of us probably already have.
** – Image from blog.makezine.co.
