Speak Discreetly

Long, long ago when I first started using voice, it was known as "discrete speech" software. That meant you could say one word and then pray to your God that the software understood that word. If your word was understood, you could continue and say a second word and so on. If your word was not understood, you had to perform a series of actions to remedy the situation. After many minutes of your life had clicked by, the correction would finally be made and you could move forward and dictate another word. You would be older, but hopefully the software would be wiser.

In those dark ages of speech recognition (circa 1995), old timey computers possessing only 32 MB of RAM, labored to run the software. Misrecognitions were rampant. Most users of speech software would alternately want to harm their computers or themselves. These periods of despair would occasionally be peppered with moments of humor. Misrecognitions can be funny!

Example 1 - I was given the task of creating a newsletter. The software's name at the time was DragonDictate. Somewhere along the line I corrected the word DragonDictate. By doing so, I added the word to my vocabulary. Then, I happily proceeded to dictate an entire newsletter dedicated to the aforementioned software. We had hundreds printed. As we were leaving to mail the newsletter to the waiting world, I gave a copy to our UPS lady. She said, "Dragon Dick ate, what's that?” Because I didn't pay close attention when correcting, I wrote a four-page newsletter about Dragons that ate... well you know.

Example 2 - A client working for a large international company liked to say "Enter-Key" when starting a new line. She drafted a memo which was to be sent to thousands of employees worldwide. Unfortunately, like me, proofreading was not her strong suit. Every time she said "Enter-Key" Dragon dutifully typed "apathy." The resulting e-mail looked like some kind of weird subliminal message encouraging employees to no longer care about their jobs. Dear employees, (apathy) Please review the new rules and regulations (apathy), etc…

Now, with the advent of continuous speech, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is much more likely to figure out what you want it to write based on the context of other dictated words. Of course, it's still not perfect. Even in our enlightened age, using speech recognition software can be a frustrating, humbling, at times comical experience.

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