A little help from my friends

This week I was talking to an author friend, Sarah McCarty, marveling at how she accomplished so much writing in what seems like so little time. Good friend that she is, she told me her secret. She uses the latest thing in voice recognition, enabling her to dictate instead of type. Obviously, talking is faster than typing.

So went to the Internet to research voice recognition. I was disappointed to learn that the program Sarah uses does not have a Windows Vista version. Luckily I read down to the next paragraph of that review and discovered Vista has voice recognition built in. The ability to chat with my computer had been mine for almost a year and I didn’t know it.

Wally World supplied a headset and yesterday my computer and I started getting acquainted. It’s a new skill, I still talk really slow but it’s faster than typeing. For me, the really cool thing about it is, the computer knows how to spell way better than I do. The program on Vista does not have punctuation suggestions, I have to put in my own, but who cares? I’m talking and the words appear on the screen, I love it.

I’m hoping to develop the skill Sarah has mastered and be able to dictate more easily than typing. It will certainly go faster which would increase production. Well, we’ll see what happens. I’m having a lot of fun learning.