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Testing Voice Recognition By Necessity in Windows 7

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Yesterday I let loose with a terrifically violent sneeze while sitting at my desk.  It was so violent that I felt a large twinge of pain in my shoulder.  About 10 minutes later, after I have continued to type I reached with my right hand to grab something on my desk.  At that point I realized that I had done something to my shoulder that would require some attention.  I am normally one who can withstand a great deal of pain.  Aches and bruises don’t usually affect me or slow me down but something in my brain said this incidence was bad.

I had my wife call and schedule an appointment with a chiropractor.  After a 2 hour session I felt a little better but I really have temporarily lost the use of my right arm.  I have about 30% range of motion at the moment.  I am a right handed and found myself quickly without the use of my right arm.  Typing at the moment is not completely out of the question, but I’m forcing myself to take it easy in order for this to heal up quickly.  So, I thought I would try to use the voice recognition in Windows 7 Beta.

I am using this on the HP 2730p Elitebook Tablet PC, without a headset.  I did the training and am currently dictating this post using voice and speech recognition that comes with the Windows 7 operating system.  So far I’ve had to correct about 40% of what I have dictated.  I am sure I could improve accuracy by wearing a headset but I’m alone in the apartment and cannot raise my arm enough to put it on at the moment. Oh well. I’ll continue to experiment before my next chiropractors appointment this afternoon.

By and large I don’t sense any great improvements in the Windows 7 beta version than what we had before.  Because I am seriously of practice this is a tedious process, but I’m sure with practice and persistence I could use this if I had to for work. The good news is that things are feeling much better today than yesterday and I think this will be a very temporary situation.

Side note: while I was waiting for the chiropractor yesterday and after the appointment I was able to answer e-mail by using the iPhone and it’s onscreen keyboard with only my left hand.  I was pleasantly pleased with the results.

7 Comments

7 Comments

  1. mobileman Alex

    01/17/2009 at 3:53 pm

    Get well soon Warner!

  2. Paul Harrigan

    01/17/2009 at 8:53 pm

    Warner, best wishes for a fast recovery.

  3. HG

    01/17/2009 at 8:57 pm

    Yes get better soon. It was good to meet you at the CES Tablet Meet UP.

    • Warner Crocker

      01/17/2009 at 9:30 pm

      Thanks. This recovery is going quite fast. My chiropractor is working miracles. I’m about 85% back to normal without any nagging pain at the moment. Range of motion is still limited but being pain free is quite a relief.

  4. Norm

    01/18/2009 at 11:20 am

    Hi Warner,

    Speech commanding and dictation in Windows provides much better accuracy when you use a high-quality microphone. Don’t use a bluetooth headset, but rather a standard plug or a USB headset with microphone. Position the microphone close to your mouth. Cheers!

  5. Adam Computes

    01/20/2009 at 1:31 am

    Try tazti speech recognition to perform searches of the internet, control itunes music player and log into and navigate facebook and myspace. Also you can create your own speech commands. It’s a free download at http://www.tazti.com. It won’t solve all your problems as it doesn’t have dictation capability but for search and other stuff it’s great.

    Feel better.

  6. Nigel

    01/20/2009 at 8:06 am

    Sorry the arm hurts (I once fractured a rib sneezing, so I appreciate the damage a sneeze can do!) but maybe you could attach a headset using the -other- arm?! I recently converted several pages of handwritten notes to onscreen text using DragonDictate. Having gone through the full voice training procedure, the level of accuracy was astounding. Only one or two words consistently fool DD, one of which is ‘alcohol’. Then again, after half a bottle of merlot, I can’t spell alcoholohol either! Strange that!

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