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#
# Location: Home
# Input Device: Dictation and manual correction
# Audio: Silence
# Visual: Messy Desk
# Energy: Medium High
# Mental: Alert
# Emotional: Nervous and Fidgety
#
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It's still happening. When I talk too fast or too long the
dictation software on the Macintosh will abruptly delete
everything. It's very distressing and it upsets me a bit.
Alternative to dictation would be something like the chorda- key
keyboard that I have seen online. This keyboard works by users
pressing a chord or multiple keys at once and software determines
what possible words you might be trying to type.
I'm not a huge fan of this idea because I don't tend to have much
luck with algorithms guessing what words I'm trying to use. I
really dislike using the same word multiple times in an email
and then a longer document I try to keep things from repeating
too frequently, or predictably.
I spent about three hours this evening researching possible
solutions that weren't hardware-based. There are zero vendors for
Apple or macOS specifically that do dictation. The operating
system and Apple as a company have a pure monopoly on the
technology here. The only other player in the arena is a company
called nuance. Nuance makes dragon dictate, and this is sadly the
only player in the window space. Until 2018 dragon dictate also
worked in macOS. I believe it was around this time that the Apple
dictation features were rolled out. I can see why a company that
sells a $200 for home users $500 for professional home users
product would be upset by this, but the two products or I guess
APIs whatever you would call them are not identical and do
not provide similar service. Dragon dictate allows for an entire
hands-free interface with the computer. macOS does have a decent
amount of integration with voice controls for accessibility, but
they are not perfect.
So what am I left to do in the situation? I've come to a cross
roads that I think is fairly clear. I can either run parallels a
Windows virtualization option. In this way I can run the windows
version of Dragon dictate and then I can dictate text without any
error and add up to three times the speed of Apple dictation. The
text is trapped in the virtual machine and could be transmitted
via email or through SSH or the clipboard over to the Mac
site.The cost here would be about $350 to pay 120-ish bucks for
the parallel software and $200 plus tax for the dragon dictate
software. The alternative to this rather pricey solution would be
to except that the text it's taped when I am talking is ethereal
and ephemeral. So I cannot be sure that it will be remaining on
the screen once I finish talking.What I end up having to do is
speak a few sentences and then stop look at the screen and guess
or gauge if it's done processing the words I've said and if so
then I go ahead and double tap on the control key to stop
dictation.It's a much cheaper solution, but it does cause me a
little frustration. The biggest headache and the one that really
causes me emotional distress is that as I've complained before my
memory isn't always that great and when I'm on a roll I can
easily not remember what I was saying or what I was talking
about.Sure I could go ahead and just run a voice recorder and
record what I want to say as an audio file, but I'm not sure how
I would be able to pull that out easily.
So this is a bit of a longer one where I complain about dictation
again. L O L such is the life that I am leading right now. I'll
leave you with a small update on my real life.
Today at 1:40 PM at the affectionately called Marcel the Shell
theater, my friend Travis, Amir and I went to see the latest
Halloween movie called Halloween Ends. This movie Michael Myers
is back but it's finally over, Jamie Lee Curtis is in this movie
and it seems like it'll be her last. Well we lost a few sentences
but that's OK. This weekend was the second of two weekends for
Austin city limits or ACL a music festival that happens every
year. They switch to doing it two weekends because there are so
many people that want to go but there's no way to make the park
larger and so they just have the event twice one weekend after
the next.So the relevancy there is that with a ACL going on the
number of people who are interested in going to see a movie and a
movie theater is reduced so me and two friends got to go see a
movie and the only other person there was a small couple or a
young couple on a dateAnd they kept talking about what they were
going to buy at H-E-B on their way home so we felt OK to make
jokes about the movie which is always enjoyable.
Well thanks for reading I'm not really sure how interaction works
with gopher. If I'm supposed to post on to be board to let people
know answers to questions or if people have questions they put
them there I'm not sure. Is this something that other people do
or are these posts insured are in encourage to be only one way?
Thanks a lot I'll try and post again tomorrow.
