The Spoken Printed Word

There is a completely different picture that one sees when you try to understand the holiday season in terms of frustration and misery. Yes I think lots of people are frustrated and miserable. But I don't think that really has anything to do with the holiday season. I think the holiday season is a unit of time that has been much maligned because other people look for different things and never find exactly what they want.

The ability of dictation software to rapidfire to transcribe your text is a gift and really something to be very proud of. The most important companies that have worked in this area have been frustrated for a while because of the fact they couldn't produce a product with a very high percentage rate of accuracy. Then came along various companies that eventually sold their product to Nuance.

Nuance continued to upgrade and perfect the product until they now claim that their accuracy rate is close to 98%. Well, I think anything in the 90 percentile should be applauded because, after all, if you can dictate a hundred words and then only need to correct 10 of them that's not too shabby. But nevertheless, 10 words being misspelled can prove a problem and dilemma for someone was using dictation. So then the goal was to up the odds even less than that. 98% accuracy would mean that for every hundred words, 98 of them are accurate, and only two need to be corrected. If that be the case, give or take an error margin of another three -- 95% -- then that is an astonishingly great rate.

I could never manage to type sufficiently if I did not have dictation software. Now of course, others do just fine typing with the two hands. But not me, that's not my skill and it would deter my usage greatly -- to my detriment. Whereas now, thanks to the ability of the dictation software, I can whip out a page full of material or 10 pages in the great speed.

There are numerous occasions when we need to create verbiage to fill necessary quotas of space. And sometimes simply, to allow for the flowery development of speech articulation to conjure up imagery and paint pictures with our words. The necessity for the free flow of words onto the screen especially, and then onto the printed sheet if necessary -- is of the greatest gifts of the software generation when it is produced by dictation.

Think about it.