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Well, once again it has been awhile.  However, I just had to write, or I should say dictate, a quick post.

I cannot remember if I ever wrote about it, but a couple of years ago I played around with the speech recognition in Windows XP (I think it was a part of Microsoft Office).  I used it from time to time to dictate things.  But, it was fairly limited.

Lately, I’ve been comparing the use of my phone, tablets (if I had one) and touch screens in general to that of how I use my PC.  It seems ridiculous to me that I cannot have better, quick and easy access to features on the screen as well as get text inputted more efficiently.  I seem to prefer using my Palm because I can just touch directly on what I need to get too.  This is opposed to the PC, I have to take the mouse and dragged to this, click, and then dragged to that.  Then I remembered speech recognition and did a quick search on Google to see if maybe I could get my hands on a trial version of Dragon Naturally Speaking.  I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Windows 7 comes with speech recognition built in!  I fired it up, and I love it!

What does it do for me and for my productivity?

1) Dictation—I am a pretty fast typist.  I can type about 120 words per minute on a good day.  Yet, I always feel like I can think faster than that.  Add the type-o’s that I have to correct during that typing and I just cannot get my thoughts down on paper fast enough.  With dictation, the thoughts can flow and the typing happens auto – magically.

1. Side note: after 30 plus years of typing, I am finding it a little difficult to transition my thinking from having to slow down to type to thinking at full speed. Yesterday, as I started to use speech recognition, I was thinking that this old dog could not learn this new trick.  But I find that if I take a deep breath and get my brain into a higher gear, I seem to be doing better and better.

2) Navigation – I love not having to drag mouse everywhere.  If I want to switch to another window, I just say so.  If I want to click on something on the Office Ribbon Bar, I just say so.

3) Editing – related to navigation, speech recognition brings a lot of advantage to editing text.  I can say something like “Capitalize Foresight” and it does it.  Again, no more dragging the mouse around, pointing and clicking.

The Windows 7 speech recognition module even makes little command recognition chirps like the control panels in Star Trek.  I truly feel like I have stepped into the future.  If you have Windows Seven and a good headset (this is the one I use), give speech recognition a try.  In about an hour I think you will see an incredible productivity boost.