Dragon Dictation. I got it, you want it.

Yeah, I mean that.

Ever since I began my writing career, which was early 2016 I first started taking it seriously – I have heard people rave on and on and on about the wonders of dictation. I have heard them talk about this how my productivity will go through the roof, how my word count will skyrocket and the list goes on. As you all know, I recently celebrated my 27th birthday. My lovely partner was kind enough to buy me DragonDictate. I spent about five days reading my work into it every single day, consistently. I would reread that stupid paragraph (I’m joking) over and over and over until Dragon had a semblance of accuracy. Unfortunately, I do not have the greatest microphone, so my audio input is not amazing. But this entire blog post is being dictated – with a few corrections.

I’ve had many reasons to want to try dictation, but the most pressing is that my hands get sore thanks to some old injuries. And unfortunately, as often happens in a sedentary job, it’s getting worse. So I was desperate for a way to “fix” my problem. And here it is.
I can sit here stretching my hands were sitting on the hands or whatever and just talk, and all my words appear on the page like magic. And that is it is magic. One thing I will say though as that’s you do need separate profiles for each use of the software. What I mean by that is I am not writing my blog post the way I will be writing my book – let’s face it this is way more informal, more casual. Also in my fantasy work, I had to train Dragon to recognise different names different places and there are a lot of technical things that it needs to remember. Here on the blog, it’s just plain and simple English, with me rambling on about whatever topic I choose to talk about this week. This week that happens to be my newest toy. Like any adult still stuck in childhood, I love new toys and this one has been so much fun to get to know. To give you an idea of how much correcting I now need to do, the next paragraph will be completely unedited so enjoy.

I’ve had Dragon for about 10 days, and if used for approximately seven of those. One thing I did find in the beginning was the saw frustrated with it getting things wrong and not hearing my voice properly or not quite’s getting the right spelling of the word and even if I trained it those words wouldn’t get become right. I also find that I stutter a lot, so I’ll begin a sentence and then pause and golf in a different engine and if I don’t correct that you get things like “get become rights” and “golf in a different engine” – which was meant to be “go off in a different direction”. Magic and there is not perfect this try that again – let’s try that again, for as you can see it’s not perfect.

Okay, I can’t do it, I need to correct. I’ll leave that paragraph but what I’m trying to say is that I still need to train my dragon and I still need a better microphone, but overall writing now takes a lot less time and tends to be a lot easier. I don’t mean easier in this scheme of coming up with ideas, I mean more that I get so many more words down on the page then I could before.

I also didn’t expect my blogging and casual mindset to click over to speaking as fast as it, I guess I have my podcast to thank for that. For my fantasy, while I haven’t tried to write anything new using Dragon, I have a feeling that my mindset will take a bit longer to change over purely because I write my blog how I speak, I do not write to my fantasy the way I speak. I know what it is, perhaps that will change.

I can say though, I am very excited to see how far I can take this, and how fast I can become with the writing side of things.
As it is in the title – I’ve got this, you want it.

x

H

(BTW, I’m writing this on 20 June – so when you’re reading it I will have been playing with Dragon for a little bit longer ^.^)