Writing Blog Posts With Voice Recognition Software

One idea that has long fascinated me is dictating rather than writing my work. In my head, it would make the whole process faster and more efficient. I gave it a try quite a few years ago when doing so involved purchasing special software and training it to recognise your voice. It was far from successful. Accuracy was very low, and it was almost impossible to edit as I went along.

Basically, it was a complete waste of time back then. However, things move on and technology improves. I now find that the voice technology that comes free with my phone is superior in every way to the option that I actually paid quite a lot of money for back in the day. So, is the problem solved?

Unfortunately, no. The reality is that I'm very used to typing, and I find it very conducive to thinking simultaneously. So, although the technology now enables me to beat my finger-based word count in theory, this is not of much practical benefit because my brain slows me down even more than the limitations of the keyboard used to. The question to which I do not know the answer is whether this is down to my habits of thought and long practice, or if it is inherent to the writing process. The only way to find out is to invest some time and effort into using the voice dictation option and see if my ability to use it improves over time.

So that is what I plan to do. The system that seems to work best for me is the one built into Google Docs. That is how I am composing this particular article. This is the strategy: I'll compose mentally and dictate a rough draft on my phone. I'll edit it later with a keyboard.

Let's see how it goes