Okay, fess up! Who here is still typing on the keyboard?

I just bit the bullet and bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a voice recognition software. I cannot believe how much more I can get done and how faster it is.

I'm using it right now, to create this message in the forum!

I'm going to train mine more today, but it's already working amazingly for me. I suggest if anyone else's tired of typing a lot or wants to get more done, they invest in DNS ASAP.

I bought the mobile version so that I could take it with me and write anywhere I wanted. This might be a bad thing-it could mean I work twenty four seven.

However, a single page used to take me 15 minutes to write. I just wrote a 408 word article for e-zine articles in about two to three minutes.

The only thing I don't like is having to talk out loud and my entire family listen to me all day long.

Tiff :-)

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A vision opens before me: Groovy is sitting (or walking around?) with her new techno voice thingy and spouting witty verbage into it. Witty verbage that is continually punctuated with, "What, honey? No, you've had enough gum today." "It's in the top drawer right by the socks." "Oh dang, I forgot to call Maurice!" "Why DID I come into this room?????"

Then there would be the other voices piping up at inopportune moments: "Mama, MAMA...Watch my little computer game person!" "I haaaaate math!" "I'm hungry!" "Mama, when can we have friends over? What time does Daddy come home? How's that techno voice thingy work?"

And if is portable I'd be in big trouble because you KNOW I'd be taking it on my bike. I always write my best articles while I'm cycling way out in the middle of nowhere, then I forget them as soon as I get home.

Oh...and Groovy in the grocery store with a techno voice thingy? THAT's a scary thought! Especially considering that I have already been followed by other patrons who wanted to hear how my "conversations" (with myself, of course) ended up.

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"In the beginning was the Word..."

http://groovybell.blogspot.com/

and

http://groovytrekkers.blogspot.com/

Now I Squidoo!!!
http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/groovyoldlady

LOL! It's really good about keeping outside noise out of the recordings - I have 3 kids, including an 8 and 3 yr old. And you can tell it "go to sleep" when you're babbling to yourself and "wake up" when you're ready to "write" again.
tiff ;)

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Bought it awhile ago -- used it for awhile and got tired of it. I found that I was spending a lot of time correcting small errors. The problem with it is that when it makes a mistake, it substitues a word that is the wrong word but that is spelled correctly -- so spell check won't catch it.

I might dust it off and try it again, but I found that even though it is pretty accurate, the error rate was just too high for me for professional applications.

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"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

-- Samuel Johnson

I'm not sure about previous versions, but version 9 claims a 99% accuracy rate once you train the software.

I've only done three of about 10 trainings so far.

I'll let you know how it goes once I complete the full set -- it's time-consuming, but I feel like it'll be worth it.

I know it used to take me no less than 15 minutes to write a 400 word article. Doing it in two to three minutes today was a miracle!

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Want to talk about writing for money? Visit my new forum: http://www.tiffanydow.com/writing4profi ... index.html

I just got a new laptop that has built-in speech recognition software and tried it, but my mic isn't good enough. Need to go buy a decent headset with microphone. But, I'm with you on picking up the speed. I can talk fast, you betcha. And here's another plus. Hubbo is writing a how-to and can't type to save his life. But he can read his own handwriting, so that saves me the chore. Could save a marriage. ;)

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