As promised, although little later than planned, here is my
review of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I will be doing this review using only
Dragon NaturallySpeaking, afterwords (afterwards) I will go in and edit it, putting corrections in red parenthesis to show where
mistakes were made, if there are mistakes, that is.
As some of you might know I injured my hand the summer which
made typing my book near impossible. I looked into Dragon NaturallySpeaking
as a way to keep writing without using my injured hand. I’ve looked into the
pros and cons, I’ve read lots of Goodreads (Dragon doesn't like the word "Goodreads" and kept changing it to "good read") posts about how only bad authors
use Dragon, and I’ve seen good reviews and that (bad) reviews. Keep in mind that I
haven’t spent a lifetime training Dragon to understand my voice and how I speak.
I did the basic tutorial at the beginning which took about 10 minutes and then I just simply started using it.
Overall I’m very pleased, using Dragon is an (isn't- you have to empahsis your words especially when using contractions) easy but it is
doable. It is very awkward to sit in a quiet room and speak to your computer. It’s not
like talking on the telephone, it’s not like talking to a friend. I’ve been
using Dragon to work on my work in progress Dusk, so far the only problem I’ve
run into is with character names. I have a character named Abby, for the
longest time Dragon insisted on naming her Happy. And as funny as it might be a
vampire named Happy has no place in my current work in product (progress- see I was talking fast there and it messed up).
You have to constantly be aware of telling Dragon to insert
punctuations, fixing something right away when you see it, or learning to use
the GOPAC (go-back- again I didn't ennunciate) commands. You can’t speak too fast, too low, or slur your words (God
forbid you might have a speech impediment that would be disastrous). To be
honest, I didn’t take much time to learn all of the punctuation commands, the
go back commands, or the hotkeys. I just wanted to dive in to my work, I just
wanted to write. Dragon lets me do that. It may not be ideal, and some days it
is surely a whopping pain in the butt, but it’s worth it given the few hundred
words I can get now when I couldn’t type more than three words per minute with my injured
hand.
I still peck away one finger at a time to use Facebook or Twitter, but for my writing I’ve been using Dragon pretty successfully. Would I
want to use this software to speak an entire book? Not right now. Maybe when I
understand the fluency of it better or when I trained it better to understand my
speech then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad and it’s not bad right now. I use it
for 20 minutes at a time here and there for getting information out of my head
and onto the page, which is exactly what I intended to use it for. Is it good
that a computer can write my words as fast as I could speak or thinks them? Yes,
that is fantastic. But I do miss typing. It’s very hard to not use my hands to
go back and fix errors, but this is one of those lessons that after repeated
use it will be easier. And I have to say straight out-of-the-box Dragon is
pretty easy to begin with.
As you can see there are errors that I will need to fix. I
will go through this review before I post it and make note of the errors, but
all in all, there are no more errors than when I type fast and am in a hurry. I
still have to edit with my typing, everybody does. So it is no more work in the
editing process then there is with regular typing. I’ve seen many people,
especially on good reads (again, Goodreads), who have blasted anyone using voice to text software
as being lazy and uneducated. There is this idea that speaking your words
rather than typing them is somehow harming the literary world. Some of the
people complaining about it have said that it is the equivalent to
self-publishing a poorly written novel (you know by now that SPE takes that claim very seriously), that somehow by speaking it instead of typing it they
have watered down and diluted the literary process. I saw one comment say that
using voice to text software would only encourage people with poor grammar to
write “crappy books that they would then self publish on Amazon and make
everyone look bad”. Now I don’t know about anybody else, but having to take the
time to remember to tell the software to use a comma or a period is not lazy
and if you have to stop mid-sentence to remind a software to use
punctuation then obviously you have some grasp on how punctuation should be used.
So if I had to give Dragon a rating, what would it be?
Usability straight out-of-the-box: A- (only because you do
need to at least do the 10 minute tutorial at the beginning)
Learning Curve: B- (the learning curve starts high with
Dragon but after a few sessions the learning gets easier, and easier.)
Would I recommend it: Yes (whether you are looking into it
because you have an injury that requires you to not use your hands or simply
want to try it and see if speaking rather than typing works out faster for you, yes either way I recommend it. I don’t see anything wrong with using whatever is available to
help you accomplish your goal)
Side note: speaking this review took me about 20 minutes. I didn’t
start with a script, I had no idea where I was going with this or what I wanted to say, so off the top
of my head and having to go back and use very few verbal commands for
correction I was able to write/speak a review totaling roughly about 950 words.
950 words isn’t too bad for 20 minutes.
they push her to strive for greatness. There once was a motto that Ashley heard in her youth through her Taekwondo life 'Reach for the Stars' and that is what Ashley has always done. It was through her upbringing that the values Ashley has and displays come from. With her parents always cheering her on in life she was able to grow up having faith in herself and her ability to conquer the world.
