I haven't written anything for a while. There are number of reasons (or excuses), one of them is that my vision has been deteriorating stop. To help me continue using the computer I have purchased some voice recognition software.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking uses voice recognition to type in what I say into a microphone) VGA rather than using the keyboard. It wasn't long ago that voice recognition software was a hit and miss affair. But as you can see from this blog post, which I am dictating not typing, the technology has improved immeasurably.
This is so much easier than touch typing. I can use natural speech patterns and talk quite normally and the program understands and inputs what I want. In the past this type of software required you to speak each word in a robotic manner but now you can just speak that this it normally, albeit adding punctuation as you go.
It is early days of me using Dragon NaturallySpeaking and the software learns your speech patterns and pronunciation the more you use it. I will come back to the subject after I've been using it for a while but so far I'm extremely impressed.
My biggest criticism of the Dragon NaturallySpeaking is, that for a program so obviously useful to the blind and visually impaired community, the menus, dialogue boxes, and activation are all very small, and it would probably need a sighted person to help initial setup. Many other programs these days, designed for people with sight problems, have setups with speech, that talk you through the installation. It would have been nice for Dragon to have included this.
Still, I can see how useful this piece of software could be to people with sight loss.
Saturday 12 May 2012
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