Okay, I WAS on a dragon.
In fact, I wrote this whole blog post using the new Dragon, but I lost it. I failed to read up on how to use the little dictation box, or at least the part about having a file open, blahdy blahdy blah blah. Good thing it wasn't a chapter!
So.
What I had written before, ish:
This morning Supe decided to jump right into the dictation thing and recorded and walked, and for her very first hour ever, she got 587 words! I couldn't believe it! (For those of you who don't know who Supe is, she can talk like a semi-automatic at times, but I had no idea she might be able to compose so fast, verbally! And her first hour too! I'm so psyched!
My day has been spent editing and waiting for the teenage cavalry to come to my rescue and install my dragon. When I put the disk in, no prompts came up, and that was where technology can stop me in my tracks. I looked at the files and none of them said "set up." My son walked me through it, however, and the Dragon took off.
The tutorials were very simple. Much easier than learning Scrivener, I promise. And even I was able to learn that. This is a piece of cake.
I thought this was going to be really hard and it wasn't. I could have written a whole lot faster, but I kept finding myself waiting for the program to catch up. I guess it has to take a few seconds to figure a word or two, then it spits out whole sentences. When I looked away from the screen, it just flew.
The only advice I would offer right now is to pay close attention when they tell you to speak in phrases and not single words as much as possible. Phrases help the program figure out what words you really meant. The slower you go, the more mistakes. The more I watched the screen typing things out, the slower I went and the more mistakes were made.
On a positive note, with all those mistakes, I also learned how to edit them. And the editing was the part that intimidated me the most. Now that's all downloaded into my brain. I'm ready to rock and roll.
I have to admit that when those words disappeared I just wasn't up to dictating this post again and correcting all those mistakes again. Correcting verbally was a lot easier than I thought it would be, but I'm mentally exhausted from all this learning. My old brain needs a rest.
Tomorrow, I'm going to enunciate better. I may have to invest in one of those gamer headsets, especially if it's going to save me a lot of time. But for now, there's no pin money attached to my pin.
Oh, yeah. No word count today. Just editing and reading through finished books to keep some facts straight for sequels coming up.
Here's to a mind-blowing word count, and calorie burn, tomorrow.
Okay. I'm with you on the idea of how constructive this could be - riding the dragon to get your word count WHILE getting in your walking. And I'm very attracted to the idea... because, heaven knows, I NEED to be walking. [But I NEED to be writing... but I NEED to be... yeah, my life, on a loop]. Here's where the picture blurs for me. What particular piece of equipment do you use that allows you to get out and walk and still dictate the story? Color me confused... [not at all unusual, by the way].
ReplyDeleteThe version I bought comes with a digital recorder that recharges like a phone, but it also has batteries to keep it from dying. (Not sure if I'll get a warning or not.)
DeleteIt also came with a headset I can plug into the recorder so I don't have to hold it up to my mouth the whole time. If I put the recorder in my pocket, I can dictate hands free. I can also take the recorder with me all the time to record ideas that hit me.
Then I come back to my computer, hook the recorder up to my computer with the same cord I use to charge it (I'm pretty sure). I'll download the audio file to my computer, then upload it into the Dragon program, which will transcribe it. I don't even have to hear myself stuttering.
I use the same headset to dictate directly to my computer. And I use the headset to make the corrections so the dragon gets used to my voice. If I get impatient with that and just edit it myself, the dragon won't learn and adjust as quickly, but I can do that too.
Reid Rosenthal has been doing it for 20 years. He predicted it would take about a month for me to get better. I can just imagine how easy this will be then, especially if the dragon is making fewer and fewer mistakes.