Speak Naturally
My quest for an ergonomic solution for my workstation began a couple of months ago. I spend most of my days working on my computer, mainly writing. Until then I occasionally suffered from some sort of strain in my hands, but two month ago it got worse. I really started to worry about causing myself permanent damage.
My first option was to buy an ergonomic keyboard. I got myself a fancy split keyboard and hoped for the best. For a couple of weeks it seemed to work. I worked as usual, and felt less stress on my hands. But then the pain returned. I knew that the only real solution for the problem was to stop working for a while and give my hands some rest.
The problem was that I really like writing. I didn’t want to stop. And on top of that, I had some obligations, which didn’t permit me to take it easier for a couple of weeks.
Then, I found my savior: Dragon NaturallySpeaking. NaturallySpeaking is a voice recognition application. Imagine writing without touching your keyboard. Imagine writing dozens of pages without feeling any physical strain. Imagine writing while leaning back in your chair or walking freely around the room. NaturallySpeaking promised all that and more, and boy did it deliver.
I must admit, I was skeptical at first. Over the years, I’ve seen some voice recognition applications and I wasn’t really impressed. Frankly, it’s been more than five years since I’ve last tried such software, and even that was just for fun. Maybe this is why I was amazed to see NaturallySpeaking in action.
In less than ten minutes of training (and by that I mean training the software) NaturallySpeaking was already correctly identifying most of what I was saying. I didn’t have to speak slowly or unnaturally. On the contrary. NaturallySpeaking is more accurate when you speak fluently. Its heuristics help it identify words based on their context. This amazing software can go over your Word documents and e-mails and analyze your writing patterns. This “trick” again helps it identify what you’re trying to say more accurately.
But there is even more. Occasionally, the software does make a mistake. In such a case, you can ask it to correct the mistake. When you do this, NaturallySpeaking opens a dialog with possible corrections from which you can choose what you actually meant. If the desired word is not available in this list, you can spell it. And the greatest part is that NaturallySpeaking actually uses your corrections to learn and improve itself.
NaturallySpeaking also has an extensive set of commands to navigate, edit, and format your documents. So in fact, I can create an entire document from scratch using nothing but my voice.
So now, I do all my writings (articles, blog posts, e-mails, and my upcoming book) almost without touching the keyboard. Needless to say that my hands are much more relieved now. I even became more productive since starting to use it. My typing speed was reasonable, but I can still talk faster than I type. Now I just hope I won’t lose my voice ;)
Theoretically, you can do a lot more with NaturallySpeaking. It is actually designed to enable you to operate your computer without using a keyboard or a mouse. To be honest, I don’t use these features. I hope I will never have to. But the benefit NaturallySpeaking has for writing is enormous. It makes you more productive, and it enables you to take better care of yourself.
It does require some time to get used to, but it is worth the effort. Even if you are not suffering from any physical problem, why take the risk? And if you can even become more productive for the same money, why not give it a try?
