Voice Recognition

[Paul Whybrow]

This article on voice recognition appeared via one of the newsletters that I subscribe to:

How to Write More in Less Time with Voice Recognition

Author Jenna Harte is in favour of it, saying she doubled her writing output.

I’m dubious of this—how much of her ‘output’ needed to be heavily edited? Or, is she claiming that everything she spoke into the software was word perfect? That’s unlikely. I could make up and tell a story on the fly, but it would be different and inferior to what I write when concentrating while typing—with research material and dictionaries and a thesaurus to guide me.

Presumably, she’s using annotated notes to guide her storytelling, especially for when to instruct the software to add punctuation.

From my last nine months spent creating audiobooks, I agree with her advice to slow down your narration. But, enunciating clearly can cause as many problems as it solves, for while you want an awkward word to be audible emphasising it can make it stand out in a distracting way.

Have any of you used voice recognition software?

Do you think that this is a workable way of reducing time spent writing?

 

[CageSage]

Using audio to record takes away from the rhythm and sense of pace, so it does need more editing even if it does take well to commands for punctuation (which it often doesn't, especially double quotes and new paragraph/line), but once you're on a good tilt with training the software, it can dramatically increase output, so if you're the person who writes a shit first draft and then rewrites the [stuffing] out of it, this process can work well. No guarantees, though, as it can take years to train the software to understand properly (and assuming there are no updates, crashes, voice changes in the user, etc.).

 

[Robinne Weiss]

I have a friend who swears by it. She spends all day walking (8-9 hours every day) around her city's parks while she records her first draft. I envy that--the main thing that slows down my writing when I have the time to do it is my inability to sit still at my desk for long periods of time. The standing desk is better, but I still need to be in motion. I've chatted to her about the software she uses and have looked into getting it, but haven't quite gotten to the point where I'm ready to invest the money into it (it's not cheap to get software that works well--free ones are apparently worth what you pay for them).