.FLYINGHEAD FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
.TITLE Voice dictation saves the day
.DEPT
.SUMMARY It’s been a rough month for Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz. A broken arm is never fun. But the show must go on and writing must be done. In his monthly column, David shows you how a voice dictation program can be married with the Pilot Desktop. The solution is amazingly cool. You dictate, and to do items show up in the Pilot Desktop and are available on the PalmPilot at the next HotSync.
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
Its amazing how your perspective can change in just a few, short hours. The date was Thursday April 9th. Managing Editor Denise Amrich and I were going to a local restaurant for lunch. To actually reach the restaurant area proper, you have to travel through a darkened bar. It was nothing sinister, just a small bar and a bunch of regulars in the middle of the day.
Unfortunately, the floor was uneven (and not marked as such). I lost my balance, fell, and in the process broke the main bone in my upper left arm. It wasn’t the pain that caused these perspective changes. It wasn’t the four hours in the emergency room, it wasn’t the concerned expressions of caring friends, it was the temporary loss of things I had taken so for granted that I practically never noticed them.
Now, you need to understand that an ungainly cast worn for eight weeks may suck, but that’s about as bad as it gets — medically, at least. Okay, so it hurts. And we had to kit-bash some clothes together to make them fit over the cast.
In some ways the changes of perspective I mentioned are about freedom. In other ways, they’re about simple awareness. You need to understand what I do for living to completely "get it".
Loyal readers of PalmPower know that I’m the Editor-in-Chief of this publication. But, in point of fact, that doesn’t really describe what I do. You see, I’m the founder of a small company. Component Enterprises, the company that publishes PalmPower, is my baby. There are only four of us here and that means we all get to do many jobs. This may come as a surprise to some of our readers who seem to think we’re a huge organization somehow part of the company that builds PalmPilots. We’re not. It’s just four of us, a bunch of computers, and an amazingly cute and highly anti-social cat named Samantha. So while I’m the Editor-in-Chief of PalmPower, I’m also the company’s only programmer.
And programming is still a big part of what makes PalmPower tick. Our Journal Production System was a major programming project. Development, frankly, is still underway. This program is also makes PalmPower happen. Without the use of both hands for the next six to eight weeks, programming and improving the Journal Production System becomes pretty tough.
Perspective change: I’m always bitching about the programming I have to do. I never really appreciated the fact that I was able to do it. Thankfully, in six or eight weeks, I’ll probably be bitching again.
Perspective change: Until the doctor says so, I can’t drive. Because I might get my cast wet, I can’t take normal showers. And on and on and on. There are a lot of little things, nothing critical, and nothing truly life-threatening, but all amazingly inconvenient. I broke my arm and I’ve had to rearrange my life.
Now I’m not whining here (at least not too much). But it is making me think. I’m thinking about how to accomplish programming without doing it myself. Have I been too hands-on, and not enough of a manager? I’m thinking about walking a block to the video store rather than driving to one that I tend to favor more. Have I been fussy, unwilling to take a five-minute walk that would do me a world of good? I’m thinking about how to write, without having the use of two hands. I’m thinking about how to keep my priorities when writing Graffiti and typing are off-limits.
Am I thinking outside the box? I think I am. Slowly. Mostly because I’m really not sure where the box is. That makes it hard to tell where the outside of the box is. I’m healing, trying to stay emotionally upbeat, and trying to do my job. Lots of people have it way worse than I do and I try to remember to be thankful for the flexibility in my job each and every day.
Well, this injury will be healing over the next bunch of weeks. But meanwhile, there are some factors in this situation of mine that do relate to the PalmPilot. And I bet you thought I’d never make the connection!
For the first week, I was barely able to move. Everything hurt. Standing up and sitting down were difficult because when the arm moved, the pain was intense. But I needed to make many calls and arrangements. The fact that I could get my Address Book to open with a single button press, and scroll down with physical buttons on the unit meant that I could get to phone numbers and use my PalmPilot with my right hand alone. That was a big help.
Once I could move around more easily, I could sit in front of my computer. But I still could only peck about with one hand. Given the quantity of words I need to turn out (email messages, columns like this, correspondence, proposal letters, and the like), one handed typing wasn’t gonna cut it.
I bought a product called NaturallySpeaking from a company called Dragon Systems. This is a continuous speech recognition program. It’s fussy, but it works.
To use the program, first you must train it. This involves long sessions of reading while the program records your vocal patterns. Boring but necessary. Once trained, you speak into a microphone and words (hopefully the right ones) show up on-screen.
There are three modes of interaction with NaturallySpeaking: dictating into the NaturallySpeaking word processor, dictating directly into Microsoft Word, and dictating directly as simulated typed-in text in any Windows program. For the most part, I use the NaturallySpeaking word processor. That’s how this article is being written.
But the typed in text mode works really well in electronic mail and in the Pilot Desktop. For example, in my Eudora mail program, when I click in the subject field and say "my new article", the NaturallySpeaking engine actually sends character by character input as if it was being typed directly into the subject field.
I live my life around my to do list. It’s sad, but true. Not being able to type into the Pilot Desktop (and using Graffiti is way out!) prevented me from keeping track of my to do items. As you might imagine, with a broken arm, it’s even more important to keep track of the items that need to be completed.
But (and this is so cool), when in the Pilot Desktop ToDo module, I can simply click the New button, click in the ToDo field, and dictate my action item. This gets me fully up and running with my PalmPilot.
There are some definite limits to NaturallySpeaking. The software initially crashed on me repeatedly and eventually stabilized into a usable state, although it still crashes on occasion. It took a very long time before recognition became anywhere near tolerable. The company claims over 95 percent recognition, but I’m living somewhere around 80 percent. Even so, I can write articles like this and do my job.
There were two other problems. First, the documentation is pretty weak, especially in the very critical area of getting recognition up to usable quality. Second, when installing NaturallySpeaking, the Dragon Systems installer chose to install a DLL that conflicted with my Visual C++ compiler. The suggestion by the technical support staffer that I constantly switch DLL versions when I want to run in NaturallySpeaking or my Visual C++ compiler was less than helpful.
Nonetheless, if you happen to be in a situation like me where speech recognition is suddenly essential to your daily functioning, NaturallySpeaking will get you through, despite occasional frustration.
So that has been the story of my last week and a half. If you haven’t seen me on the PowerBoards or I’ve been slow in responding to my email, now you know why. Have fun, take care, and watch your step.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
NaturallySpeaking is available from Dragon Systems at http://www.dragonsys.com
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO David Gewirtz is the Founder and Chairman of Component Enterprises, Inc. He is the Editor-in-Chief of PalmPower Magazine, published by Component, and The Insider for Lotus cc:Mail, published by The Cobb Group division of Ziff-Davis. He is also the author of "The Flexible Enterprise" and "Lotus Notes Revealed!"
.DISCUSS http://www.component-net.com/webx?13@@.ee6bd52
