Thu Apr 19, 2007 12:15PM EDT

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A week ago I promised I'd be offering progress reports on my experiences with voice dictation software. Well it's been seven days, and it's time for an update. Here are some thoughts on what it's been like to use the software, in no particular order.

• The the biggest problem for me has been dictating in complete sentences. I don't know if I'm like most people, and I didn't really realize this before I started using dictation software, but when I type, I think up the sentence as I'm writing it. Dictation software works best if you pause, think of the entire sentence, then speak it all at once. Pausing in the middle of a sentence often wreaks havoc on the text. Naturally, it depends on what I'm writing: Writing a blog post is much more difficult than dictating an email or dictating into an instant messaging program.
• Fiddling with the settings within Dragon has made some of this easier. But rather than dictate in complete sentences, I changed the options within Dragon to not insert commas and periods automatically. Now I can talk, pause, and continue to talk again after I figure out the rest of what I want to say.
• Talking and typing use different parts of the brain. I think with training it will get better, but I feel like material I type is more polished than material I speak aloud. When dictating, I spend more time editing my material than when I have typed it, and the editing is more difficult, because the errors are more subtle.
  
• I have discovered some annoying problems in the recognition software. Dragon refuses to recognize the word pause properly, repeatedly inserting clause in its space.
• Though I am using the software on a year-old laptop I've had absolutely no performance problems. I can dictate a long string of text (though I rarely do this) and Dragon has no trouble parsing it all and displaying it correctly, for the most part.
• I find it strangely difficult to watch the screen as I dictate. Not sure why.