We thought it would be great to be able to "simply" dictate words into a word processor, so we got a program to do it. I read that it was critical to do the voice recognition passages so that the program would learn one's voice and get the words right, and I dutifully read some passages, but was anxious to try it out "for real." I did pretty well, but never having had to do dictation for a secretary or dictaphone in past years, it was a challenge to realize I had to tell it when to capitalize, put in punctuation, etc. Worse, though, was learning how to correct the inevitable mistakes in "understanding."
What was really fascinating was watching the words march across the "page" in the document without me having to touch the keys. Seeing it take shape made it a lot easier to remember when to say, for instance, "comma" or "paragraph."
My husband thought this was going to be easy. He had heard our son talking about how great it was, and he didn't see any need to read the instructions. He did read the practice passages, but it seems to have a very hard time understanding him. He does have a bit of an accent, but it's not that pronounced. I asked him whether he had read the instructions. Of course not!
It turned out that he had the microphone plugged in wrong, hadn't calibrated it, hadn't set it as the input device, and was talking into the wrong side of it. On top of that, he decided to import songs into iTunes at the same time, and that created an audio input that seemed to "compete" with his voice input and inserted words from the songs interspersed with what he was trying to dictate. The results were hilarious!
Ahh, these wonderful inventions. If we can only master them!
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