Day 1002 - Tried some other dictation apps

-

Wow, I can’t believe it’s already been over 1000 days since I started this writing blog. It has been immensely helpful to me to be able to blog about my writing productivity experiments. It has also been good accountability to blog about my word count and hours worked.

I usually try to take a day of rest on Sunday, but I ended up doing a lot of marketing work, so I decided to take yesterday (Monday) as my day of rest instead and I only did the bare minimum of writing work to keep up my writing streak. I intended to only dictate 5 minutes, but it ended up being about 15 minutes instead.

I also decided to try using the Dragon Anywhere app and also the text-to-speech function in the Pages app on my iPhone. I only used the microphone on the phone, but both apps performed remarkably well.

Dragon Anywhere allows you to add vocabulary words so that I could add my characters’ names and record myself saying them. When I dictated the names, Dragon Anywhere correctly transcribed them.

You can also add vocabulary to Siri, although that requires you to go to Settings, Accessibility, Voice Control, and then Vocabulary. However, you can’t record yourself saying the vocabulary words. Siri does its best, but it doesn’t always recognize a name I input into vocabulary and then dictate.

In the end, I think I prefer using my digital voice recorder over the Dragon Anywhere app or Pages app, because I’m such a control freak that it bothers me to see the little errors when they’re transcribed and not try to correct them right then and there. However, doing that slows down my dictation speed, and I get more words written when I focus more intently on the dictation without being distracted.

I had used Dragon Anywhere and also Siri a couple years ago when I first started looking into dictation, and at the time, I was disappointed at the poor accuracy. It’s likely that the technology has grown in leaps and bounds.

However, I also wonder if that has to do with the quality of the microphone. My old phone was an iPhone 8, and I recently got an iPhone 14. Also, when I use Siri to dictate in a word processing application on my computer, the accuracy is quite good (except for proper names) when I use my podcasting microphone.

Today was a bit of a weird day because unlike most days, I didn’t have IBS issues in the morning, but I started getting IBS issues in the afternoon. I had luckily gotten a dictation session done in the morning, and I also finished revising a chapter of my Hawaii book before the IBS symptoms started up.

I had planned to get another dictation session done later in the day but didn’t get to it before dinner, and after dinner I was simply too exhausted. So I didn’t get as much written today, plus I skipped out on doing any marketing tasks (I usually try to do one marketing task a day). Instead, I’m going to go to bed early, and hopefully I’ll feel better once I wake up.

My takeaway for today: The technology has developed enough that even the free text-to-voice functions are very good, but I prefer a digital voice recorder so that I don’t have to look at the recorder or worry about it turning off when I pause, and so that I can focus on the dictation without being distracted when I see words on my phone screen.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 21: Bullet journal, Surrender statement

-
Today was my writing Sabbath so I didn’t do any writing today, but I spent a lot of time doing writing-related things. I did some blogging, and I also reviewed my writing To Do list. I cleaned it up by checking off what’s been done, deleting what I no longer need to do, and making note of what I need to do this coming week. Before I started bullet journaling (in an electronic journal app, Day One Journal ), I had my To Do lists in a couple different places and I’d usually forget things I needed to do. Now I have them in my bullet journal, which combines journaling with task organizer, and I’m less likely to forget. I still set reminders for myself in my phone, but since I’m using my journal throughout the day every day, I’m more likely to see things I need to do. I found some of my old To Do lists today and incorporated some things in my bullet journal. One of them was my writing Surrender Statement, which is a prayer I pray before starting each day’s work. What’s a Surrender Sta
Read more

Day 783: Evaluation 7

-
It’s been almost seven months since I wrote my last Evaluation 6 , but I finally got around to Evaluation #7! Here’s the gist of what I’ve learned over the past few months about my writing and productivity. New schedule My IBS was slowly been starting to feel better recently. I am still extremely strict with my diet, but I am also starting to experiment with what foods I can and can’t eat. I have also started a new eating and sleeping schedule, which I have dubbed my “chrono-diet” because I’m trying to take advantage of my circadian rhythm, according to the book Change Your Schedule, Change Your Life (I had borrowed a copy from the library but I enjoyed it so much I went ahead and bought it). I have started waking up at 6 am and exercising first thing, then having breakfast after exercise. I do house chores and/or work until noon, which is when I eat lunch. I’m supposed to not eat until dinner around 5:30 or 6, but I haven’t been able to break the habit of snacking in the aftern
Read more

Day 91: Evaluation 3

-
Even though I was taking a few days off because of my health issues, I ended up doing some work after all, and also came up with some new ideas. But first, let me summarize the past month. Outlining my series Something which I thought was interesting was looking at the raw numbers of how long it took me to outline my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series. It had a rough start, especially because I changed my mind about it several times and had some bouts of writer’s block, but things picked up this year especially when I wrote down my writer’s process and began systematically doing the Snowflake method on each of the volumes in the series. I finished outlining all the books in the Lady Wynwood’s Spies series on August 1st! Yay! This included the serial novel. Unfortunately those numbers were not included in the above post on my raw numbers, but I will eventually do a follow-up post and also list how many hours it took me to write and edit the volumes in the series. Hopefully it will take
Read more