Freedom Of MacSpeech

This has to be a first for me. I am sitting in Michael, my most comfortable of chairs, playing with a Heineken rugby ball that I won in some poxy pub quiz about two years ago, dictating to Jarvis my iMac via a headset and microphone.

The entirety of this blog post will be made with MacSpeech Dictate. The scary thing is, it’s almost as if a real someone is listening to me and writing down my crap. And, as a consequence, for the first time in history, I don’t actually have anything to say.

Well, that is not strictly true, is it? After all, I have already managed two paragraphs, and am no doubt about to manage a few more. This blog post is the first time I have used MacSpeech after getting it out of the box. I’m surprised and rather pleased to find that it can actually listen and write down really quite accurately everything that tumbles out of my mouth. It seems I no longer have an excuse for not writing a blog post, as technically I will no longer have to write blog posts, but just say them at Jarvis my iMac. (And yes it actually recognises the name Jarvis.)

All this sounds incredibly exciting and should make my life much easier. However, it also means that I actually have to know where my sentence is heading before I finish saying it. This, normally, is not a problem, as when I type I often make up the end of the sentence while I am still in the middle of it. Doing a blog post in Dictate Mode however means that I have to know what I’m driving at while I’m still getting there. Not so easy. The good news is that so far, my voice appears to be clear enough that Jarvis can understand me and type everything out properly. In fact, I haven’t actually had to change anything he’s typed for me yet.

I wonder how this will change how I write stories, as while the dictation ability is amazing, it’s not exactly what I thought it would be. I find I’m staring at the monitor, and am more interested in what comes up than in speaking the next part. Maybe if I stop looking at the monitor and actually think about what I’m saying, it will be easier for me to get this blog post done. Speaking of which…

I think that’s all that’s fit to print right now. So while I have lots of things to talk about with Jarvis, I shall leave you lovely people to get on with your lives.

Soopytwist.

Tags:
Apple ~ iMac ~ MacSpeech