Jan 9th, 2024

Author: donich_admin

Dictate in action

I made an interesting discovery today. I have started trying to type with both hands again and for the time being, as I am trying to put the minimal amount of stress on my shoulder, I have put the keyboard on my knees so that I can type with my right hand without needing to raise it to the level of my desk. I have also made another couple of adaptions to avoid excessive movement. The backspace key is in a very inconvenient place stuck away on the extreme top right of the keyboard so I have re mapped it Using Windows power toys to that obscure Unix key at the top left which looks a bit like a` and which I have not used since I was at university. I have also made some adaptions to my typing style in that I have started to type the letter “y” key with my left hand and the “p” key with the fourth finger of my right hand rather than with my pinky.

This does not make for super fast typing as I have to keep remembering the modifications as I go along, but all in all I do not think that it slows me down more than about 5 words per minute. So here was the challenge… I took a standard passage designed for measuring words per minute in typing and tried it using the keyboard and then using dictate. The results surprised me a little; the passage I chose took me 5 1/2 minutes to type using both hands and only 2 1/2 minutes using dictate. The typing passage I corrected as I went along, but the dictate passage I actually corrected after the event by using the feature where you can substitute a word it is dubious about with the correct word in a single click. The typed passage contained no errors. The dictate passage contained 6 errors, but the time it took me to correct them is included in the 2 1/2 minutes.
This is very interesting, and leads me to believe but I might be better using dictate, or another more sophisticated package which I can buy, than I would be typing on the keyboard all the time. This of course only applies too longish passages and ones that do not contain a load of special characters. For example dictate would be quite useless in writing pen testing reports because by their nature they contain many many special characters.
I am now going to have a look at some more expensive voice recognition packages which I can use long term, and which I can train to the peculiarities of my voice.