An Experiment By Mark Gelinas (@elderac)

For my blog post, I am trying and experiment. For many, many years, I have been aware of talk to text programs such as Dragon Speak. However, for some reason, probably a reluctance to try something new, I have never used them. 

Recently however, I have started using Microsoft Word 365. Among the many features of this program, I have discovered it can translate words space directly to text. To me this eliminates the need to install additional software.

After discovering this feature, I gave it a quick test. I decided to give it a more extensive test at about the same time the opportunity opened to do this guest blog post. Therefore, I chose to use the blog post as a more complete test of this feature and see if I could use this for something meaningful.

Ordinarily I prefer to type and can touch type which is much faster than using this feature. However, I am getting older and realize eventually my fingers may not work as well as they do now. Therefore, I may need and alternate means of writing because I intend to continue writing as long as I am able.

This program is not perfect, but it will do the job. One of the problems I have encountered is it misunderstanding the words I am saying. Another problem is sometimes it does not start a sentence with a capital letter. 

Sometimes the program does not perform the edit functions like I want. For example, to remove a word or punctuation mark I should be able to simply say undo. But when I do, I may get a string of undos before the program realizes I want to delete the previous word. This is somewhat frustrating, but it is not insurmountable.

I have decided that this feature works well enough that is worth investing the time to better learn it's abilities and spend more time practicing with it. I expect that with practice it shall become easier to use. I think perhaps my next experiment will be to write a piece of flash fiction. If that works well I may move up to a short story. I do not know if I will attempt a novel length piece unless I have no alternative. But that will be for the future two determine.

In writing this, I did use one hand on the mouse. But using a mouse it's easier then typing. If I ever find the need to do something completely hands free I may have to find a different program.

In conclusion, I find this feature of Microsoft Word to be useful and have potential. If in the future I have a need for talk to text I cannot positively say I will not upgrade to something such as Dragon Speak, but for now I find this sufficient for my needs.

If you enjoyed this piece, please follow Mark Gelinas on Twitter @elderac.