Sunday, June 21, 2009

WRITING WHILE SPEAKING


This morning, I received a wonderful gift from my son on Father’s Day: a speech recognition kit for my computer. I do a lot of writing, so it’s intriguing that I can now write by simply speaking. I can talk, and the talk instantly becomes sentences, paragraphs, and essays on the screen. It’s that easy, and it’s that fast. In fact, I saw a video yesterday about speech recognition, and the moderator, a college professor, estimated that students can write essays using speech recognition in about one third of the time it would take them to type the essay on a keyboard. Already, as I write this first document using speech recognition, I can see that this is probably true. The sentences spin across my computer screen way faster than any words that I could type. It’s another miracle in this age of technological marvels – a miracle that could make writing almost as effortless and relaxing as talking.

No comments: