17 August 2011

Record Straight-Setting


Looking back over my last post, hoping for a blinding flash of inspiration which, in case you're wondering, totally failed to materialize, I realize I've been somewhat unfair. Dragon NaturallySpeaking isn't really as bad as I made it sound. Not nearly.

That's not to say that it didn't record the stuff I attributed to it last time. It did. But none of it was while I was dictating something I expected it to transcribe. It recorded most of those examples when the microphone was listening to me talk to someone else, or someone else talk to someone else, often in a different part of the house, or the radio talk to nobody at all. Sometimes I left the microphone on by accident, other times it turned itself on spontaneously, which is an annoyingly frequent occurrence.

Voice-recognition software really is pretty amazing. I use it, with head tracker mouse software, all day, every day. I use it to work on the desktop, clamber around the web, and use programs that don't know anything about voice-recognition, and I spend a lot more time doing that than I do dictating text. Although I sometimes get tangled up in too many layers of technology, for the most part, with a little patience and creativity, I can do whatever I need to do you dog wants you to do anything she's trying to be polite but you're not paying attention these are you think it's bug in the meantime I'll let you know

Sorry. I was talking to Scarecrow, and the microphone turned itself on.

Sometimes Dragon NaturallySpeaking really does misrecognize what I say. This can be either funny or annoying, depending on my state of mind, and the kind of mistakes it attempts to attribute to me can be devilishly hard to find. But really, most of the time I get caught writing something stupid, it's because I wrote something stupid. Without any help from anybody. Voice-recognition software can be a pain in the butt, but without it, I'd be in a world of hurt.

So, there's that.

It appears Tuffy is going to survive her latest medical adventure. What is it with this kid? She had a small sore get infected. It was looking pretty bad, and considering that she spends half her life on pestilential wrestling mats, I suggested she have a doctor take a look at it. It must've really hurt, because she did. The provisional diagnosis was MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), which sounded pretty bad. The doctor drained the owie, put her on antibiotics, and told her to come back every day for the next four or five days. Turns out it wasn't MRSA, just garden-variety staph, which is bad enough. It's healing up surprisingly well, considering how bad it looked. The doctor says she won't even have much of a scar.

So, there's that.

3 comments:

  1. Zoom -- Too funny that you left the conversation bit with Scarecrow in. I re-read it several times trying to make sense before moving on to your explanation!

    You know you didn't have to cop to the examples from the last post -- that they were you or some playful DNS spirits keeping the microphone on. I'm still rather impressed with what you do with both the head mouse and the voice recognition software. Your comments have better clarity, grammar, and punctuation than most -- guess that's the tech writer coming through.

    Hope Tuffy keeps getting better and I certainly pondered whether DNS recognized "pestilential" on the first round. :)

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  2. Too funny especially leaving in the Scarecrow bits.

    Hey technology is awesome sometimes and other frustrating. I wish the software I have on the computer worked as well at voice recognition as my that loaded on the cell does.

    Glad Tuffy has the lesser of the bug evils. I thought scars were cool?

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  3. Speaking of voice recognition technology, I have a weird question. I am deaf and talk different than most people because of that. What would a software like that do? Does it accomodate for such a "variance"? (for lack of a better term)

    For example I tend to drop my 's' sounds. And so on... LOL.

    Very interesting post! =)

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