As a professional writer, I work at the keyboard all day. If I'm not working on a novel, I write movie and book reviews for different online magazines. I'm very aware of how much damage repetitive motion can cause, and I've known a lot of my peers who've had serious problems: Excruciating pain followed by surgeries that didn't always fix everything.
About ten years ago, I had a cyst removed from my left wrist. At the time, it was causing a lot of pain and interfering with my writing. Since the surgery I've still had problems upon occasion when I work long days. The nerves of that hand are now basically rubbing across the bones and sometimes get inflamed.
During the recovery after the surgery, I used a program called Dragon Dictate to write by dictating the book verbally. That turned out to be an arduous undertaking and I wasn't really happy with the speed I was able to maintain or the accuracy of the software. The bottom line was that I typed faster with my hands than I could verbally. With less mistakes. Time, as they say, is money.
So I gave up on the idea of using speech recognition software.
A few weeks ago, cornered by deadlines and plagued by some of the old pain returning because of the long hours at the keyboard, I decided to try speech recognition software again.
Dragon Dictate doesn't seem to work very well on the new XP operating system. In fact I've even read that you weren't supposed to use Dragon Dictate with XP.
However, I found out that XP comes loaded with speech recognition software. I've tried it, but wasn't very happy with it. The accuracy wasn't very good and I got easily frustrated with the fit microphone, which was a good one.
Article comments
1 - Michelle
DragonDictate users will thank you for this review; it's considered an obsolete program now but a small number of people still prefer it to the newer versions. I use a USB sound pod to make sure the microphone signal is good by the time it reaches the computer, but it's good to know there's a headset microphone out there that works well with DragonDictate.
2 - Mel
Actually, Michelle, I don't use Dragon Dictate anymore. I've gone strictly to the MicroSoft speech recognition software. There are a few differences for those people have used Dragon Dictate, but I found changing over to be a piece of cake. I haven't tried this headset on Dragon Dictate because I got so frustrated the last time I tried it.