Amen to you about dictation! In the 1970s I worked for a very large company and I had a secretary. She insisted that I not write memos out in longhand because she did not want to lose her dictation skills so I bought a little voice recorder and could just give her the tape for transcription . When I left that company, it was the middle of the 1980’s and the first speech-to-text software became available. I bought a license for the software, installed it on my new PC, and I have never looked back. Even though I now work alone in a home office, dictating to the software saves so much time! Now I use the Google voice typing tool, and three other voice-to-text apps (one of them (Dragon Anywhere) dumps my dictation to the cloud from my iPhone, another (Dragon Home) runs in Windows on my desktop, and a third (Drafts) runs on my iPhone). All three are at least 99% accurate (takes practice and patience at first — all three get better the longer you use them and more convenient as you learn to use the voice dictation commands to edit). My favorite is Drafts for notes, logging events in passing — such as blood sugar monitoring from my DexCom 7 late at night — and capturing inspirations. A lot of my writing begins in Drafts as notes in the middle of the night or when I am busy around the house (there is a watch app for Drafts, so it could not be simpler). Dragon Anywhere is good for short format entries and memos, as long as I have an internet connection. Dragon Home is best for long form document creation. These greatly improve my productivity.
I’d tried dictation before and just couldn’t get the hang of it, but this time was relatively easy. I would definitely try it again. You are definitely right about the practice and patience part of things! 🙂
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Amen to you about dictation! In the 1970s I worked for a very large company and I had a secretary. She insisted that I not write memos out in longhand because she did not want to lose her dictation skills so I bought a little voice recorder and could just give her the tape for transcription . When I left that company, it was the middle of the 1980’s and the first speech-to-text software became available. I bought a license for the software, installed it on my new PC, and I have never looked back. Even though I now work alone in a home office, dictating to the software saves so much time! Now I use the Google voice typing tool, and three other voice-to-text apps (one of them (Dragon Anywhere) dumps my dictation to the cloud from my iPhone, another (Dragon Home) runs in Windows on my desktop, and a third (Drafts) runs on my iPhone). All three are at least 99% accurate (takes practice and patience at first — all three get better the longer you use them and more convenient as you learn to use the voice dictation commands to edit). My favorite is Drafts for notes, logging events in passing — such as blood sugar monitoring from my DexCom 7 late at night — and capturing inspirations. A lot of my writing begins in Drafts as notes in the middle of the night or when I am busy around the house (there is a watch app for Drafts, so it could not be simpler). Dragon Anywhere is good for short format entries and memos, as long as I have an internet connection. Dragon Home is best for long form document creation. These greatly improve my productivity.
I’d tried dictation before and just couldn’t get the hang of it, but this time was relatively easy. I would definitely try it again. You are definitely right about the practice and patience part of things! 🙂