Happy Birthday!

[frayadjacent]

I now have my settings properly set, so I knew in advance to wish kass a happy birthday! Kass, I always enjoy your posts when they show up on my reading list. You are one of the many people I can't wait to meet at VVC! I hope you have a wonderful day.

Also: I dictated this!

Comments

[kass]

Thank you so much for the birthday wishes & the kind words! I'm looking so forward to meeting you at VVC, too. \o/

[calvinahobbes]

You dictated this, as in - some sort of speech to text program? *is curious* How are your wrists?

[frayadjacent]

Yep! It works pretty well, except is extremely averse to swearwords, which is annoying. I'm hoping to use it for a lot of my dissertation writing, though I will need to add a bunch of technical jargon to its vocabulary.

It also allows you to command the computer with your voice, and I believe you can even create new voice commands for specific programs. If so, I'm hoping to create VoiceCommands specifically for Final Cut Pro so that I can vid more easily. I really want to vid more!

My wrists were getting better, but then they got worse again. So I'm trying to really avoid hands on computer use when I can.

[calvinahobbes]

Haha, well, probably cutting down on swearwords would not be the worst side effect :D I'm really impressed you can use it for dissertation work! And wow using voice commands for FCP would be so awesome!

How about editing? I mean, it would need to be very good at word recognition for you to not need to go in and edit later, or..?

I'm sorry about your wrists :( It's my biggest fear that mine are going to go, but I probably don't do enough to protect them. At least you have that awesome program to help you out now!

[frayadjacent]

Yeah, I probably won't be able to use it for editing. I'm hoping by then I'll be healed enough that I can just type normally (albeit more ergonomically than I used to).

[calvinahobbes]

Oh, I actually meant editing the output of the speech-to-text output! But yeah, I really hope you'll be able to type again by that point!

[frayadjacent]

oh yeah, it can do that, but it's not always very efficient. Sometimes it edits mistakes very well, but there are other times when it seems like it just can't figure out what I'm saying and I have to manually enter it, but that can cause more problems later, because the program doesn't know about anything that I manually enter and so if I try to use voice commands to jump to an earlier part of the text (which includes words it doesn't know are there) it can get very confused.

[calvinahobbes]

Hee, that sounds pretty challenging! But I'm still really impressed with it :D

[frayadjacent]

me too! In some ways, I feel like this is probably the most advanced software I own. There are so many subtleties to language that I kind of can't believe a computer is so successful at figuring things out. For example, yesterday I dictated “Catherine Weaver”, and was so impressed that it knew to capitalize Weaver because it was a name and not the word for the occupation.

[calvinahobbes]

Whoa, that is really impressive! It sounds like the technology has really advanced by now!