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Having written articles and books with Dragon speech recognition software, I can vouch for the following tips written by Michael at Daily Writing Tips. I can also vouch for the astounding accuracy statistics cited. It’s honestly as good (or better) than having a human transcriptionist writing down your every word!

One thing I’d add to Michael’s tips (and to bring the number of tips to 7) is to recommend using a blue yeti microphone. I’ve tried a dozen microphones over the years and the blue yeti is excellent, hands-free, keeps wires off your head, and has a focused but forgiving directional microphone pick-up pattern.

Blue Yeti Microphone

From Daily Writing Tips:

A professional writer might add a thousand words a day to their rough draft. With speech recognition software, some writers can add several thousand. That’s one reason why more writers are choosing to dictate their books. Today the error rate of speech recognition software has improved to within a percentage point of a human being. According to IBM, even a human transcriptionist hears the wrong word 4 or 5 percent of the time. IBM reached 5.5 percent in 2017. Google claims even lower than that – 4.9 percent in 2017.

Speech recognition can be found in Google Docs, Windows 10, your smartphone and in various home devices. Dragon Naturally Speaking is the only commercially-available speech recognition software for consumers, mostly because they bought all their competitors. According to their website, “Dragon is 3x faster than typing and it’s 99% accurate.” For higher accuracy, Dragon can be trained to recognize your own voice and vocabulary.

Tips for writing with speech recognition

  • Dictate in complete phrases or sentences. Recent advances in accuracy have come not so much from speech recognition (“that’s a buh not a duh”) as from language recognition (“after the words ‘eat’ or ‘peel’ the sounds ‘buh nah nuh’ are probably ‘banana’). I can sometimes see my software rewrite a sentence once I’ve completed it, because it now has more of the context and so can recognize more of the words.
  • Pause between phrases, not words. That’s mostly what I just said, but it bears repeating. Separating parts of speech with pauses (“It was… the… best of… times”) can really confuse the software. It likes to sense the sentence structure as you speak. Pausing between phrases is also a good habit for public speaking, or for speaking in general, for that matter. Yes, you need to pause while you think, but you don’t need to keep talking while you do it.
  • Watch the screen. If there are any errors or omissions, you want to make sure they’re not so serious that you can’t remember what you really meant to say. I can handle Dragon spelling “to” instead of “too” or “member” instead of “remembering.” But sometimes the software provides a perfectly spelled word that would make no sense later. In that case, I can usually dictate the correct word again, perhaps preceding it with “or rather” as a newscaster might. Or you may be able to train Dragon (and yourself) that you pronounce “to” as “tu” and “too” as “te-yoo.” Or restate your sentence in different words. Don’t worry about polluting your masterpiece with synonyms – it’s probably faster than hemming and hawing for the perfect word. You can perfect it when you edit it.
  • Keep a consistent tone, speed, and volume. Shouting, whispering or pretending you’re Robin Williams will make the software work harder. It doesn’t appreciate or even recognize histrionics. I did a stint as a professional voice transcriptionist, repeating the speech of another person more clearly so that Dragon could understand it better. We maintained a cheerful tone as we worked, but we weren’t dramatic.
  • Don’t stop for mistakes. Keep a consistent flow, where words come out of your mouth at approximately the same speed they come into your mind. Your mind will appreciate that. Don’t stop to fix typos or punctuation errors. Talk around any blatant mistakes – restate anything that’s unclear but keep dictating. Your first transcription may not be smooth or free of mistakes. But mistakes inspire creativity because they beg you to fix them. So don’t worry about making mistakes when dictating.
  • Don’t try to speak the keyboard. You’re better off just dictating words and not trying to operate your computer with your voice. Yes, Dragon has many editing commands:
    Scratch that, Scratch that <n> times, Go back, Go to top, Stop listening, Search eBay for <text>
    (NOTE TO SELF: DO NOT TRY TO WRITE NOVEL AND SHOP ON EBAY AT THE SAME TIME.)But the main commands I use are Period and New line – I’m supposed to be writing not editing – remember? – and I’ve turned off my internal editor. Dragon’s commands are great for people who can’t use a keyboard – they can say Open Google Chrome or Post to Facebook – but the extra learning curve can sour other people on trying the software.

Read the rest of Michael’s article for some excellent hands-free editing tips.

This is a quick demo of the 2 things that matter to me about Dragon dictation software. The text below the video are the actual words, as transcribed by Dragon, that you’ll hear me speak in the video (5 minutes).

The Transcription

“This is a quick demo of the two features that matter most to me in Dragon speech recognition software for the Mac. This demo is being made with version 6 professional.

The first feature is what most people think of when discussing dictation software: talking words onto the screen, exactly as you’re seeing me do now.

The accuracy is about 97%, which is about 9% better than the built-in feature on the Mac using the Siri engine. That’s 9% increased accuracy and it’s a big deal when it comes to editing, later.

You may have noticed that I’m talking a little differently than I would in casual conversation. That’s because I want the accuracy to be as high as possible. I don’t want to have to go back and edit mistakes that only happened because I didn’t clearly pronounce a word.

There are two other ways I speak differently in dictation than in casual conversations: I speak the punctuation and also some of the formatting, such as

In line breaks. Sometimes, I’ll even speak the syntax for markdown language, but let’s save that for another demo.

After a little practice, I found that speaking the punctuation, and some of the formatting, doesn’t interrupt my thought flow. In fact, it helps me think more clearly about the subject, helps me understand the context of what I was dictating, as well as eliminating most of the hassles of editing, later. The second Dragon feature that matters most to me is the ability to write anywhere.

#Writing Anywhere!

That’s right! Wherever I am I press the voice recorder icon on the iPhone and start talking. When done, I press “stop”, and then “save” buttons.

When I want the recorded files to be transcribed I send them to the Mac using airdrop and then drag and drop them onto the transcription window of Dragon. That gives me the capability to capture thoughts wherever, and whenever, they occur.

It’s not uncommon for me to dictate a few thousand words on the 20 minute ride home from dropping the kids off at school. How is that for not starting the writing day off with a blank page!

By the way, I only use the Dragon software for the Mac desktop. I don’t have the official Dragon software for the iPhone – called Dragon anywhere – the cost $15 a month. I don’t need it because I prefer to dictate onto the voice recorder app and batch transcribe all the Dragon files in the Dragon’s transcription window. Each file is transcribed to a separate text file as I’ll show you now.”