Dictation

I can be a little obsessed with getting more efficient and effective with completing my to-do list. That can be a good thing and a bad thing. My experience with dictation would have to be a good thing.

Many years ago I worked at a Sports store and one of the full-time staff members resigned to work for Dragon Dictate as a sales representative. This would have been between 1995 – 1998. Dragon Dictate was the leading software company for voice dictation. If you purchased the software you had to spend a number of hours training the system to recognize your voice and how you articulated the English language. Also at the time you had to have a dedicated microphone because the computers back then didn’t have microphones built in nor were their headphones like Apple’s which also had headphones built in.

Fast forward 20 years later we have technologies such as Siri from Apple, Cortana from Microsoft and Google Now amongst Dragon and the other market leaders. I have dabbled with dictation off and on for the last few years however in the last 12 months the technology is now mature enough for me to utilize. For example, I am a 80 – 90 words per minute typer with a 70 – 80% accuracy rate. Although I think that is good for me, going back to my improvement statement at the beginning of this point, I want to be able to do more with less. I have seen dictation as one of those avenues.

I’m using dictation on my Mac and the Apple devices in two major areas:
1. When in the car while driving as Siri can pretty much do everything I want such as play music, send messages, navigate to locations, check weather etc.
2. Writing emails on the Mac although I really want to expand the use of dictation to other areas of my work.

The problem with using dictation with my Mac is that I am a consultant and I work predominately in a open working environment. Speaking to my computer with colleagues in close proximity doesn’t really work. When at home I do get to use it a lot and will continue to do so. Human beings are so adept at communicating via language and I see dictation getting bigger and better in the years to come. What we see now is child’s play to what we will be able to do in 5 years time. Can’t wait to see it come along!