For some people, including me, the act of composing a document with your voice is a skill that takes some time getting used to.  When I first started using Dragon, I was amazed by the accuracy.  My earliest documents included original content like “this is a test of speech recognition using Dragon NaturallySpeaking.”  Those early sentences were impressively converted into the intended text.

But what next?  It was a little intimidating for me to start writing real documents with my voice.  I had the some experience that I hear a lot from others – I was “used to thinking with my fingers.”  I can’t remember who helped me at the time, or I would give them proper credit, but someone gave me some really good tips to get started.

I was told that I should probably “walk before I ran” so that I could get more comfortable with this mode of writing.  Instead of writing a lengthy article, I started by responding to some email.  The email responses were a little less intimidating because they were generally pretty short and the style of the response wasn’t that important. Next, I spent some time figuring out how to navigate my e-mail client with voice commands (in my case, I use Microsoft Outlook 2007). I realized that I could much more rapidly process my extremely voluminous e-mail traffic by using some simple voice commands. For example, I use the folder system in Microsoft Outlook very heavily for filing correspondence. I find that it is much faster to use my voice to file an e-mail in the correct folder.

One other application that is extremely compelling for me involves transcribing my handwritten notes into electronic documents. I often take a small notebook into meetings to take some handwritten notes during the discussion. These notes seem to make a lot of sense to me while I am writing them. But within about 24 hours of taking the notes, I have no idea what they mean. For example, what does "french fry (squiggle) orthogonal (squiggle squiggle) rhesus monkey" mean? To solve this problem, I could either:

1) ignore my notes;
2) learn to translate my special squiggle language; or
3) dictate my notes using Dragon

I bet you can guess which choice I made. Now, at the end of the day, I flip through my notebook and read my notes into an e-mail to myself. As long as the notes are relatively recent, I have no problem transcribing them and expanding on the thoughts significantly.

After doing this for a month or so, I realized that it was getting easier and easier for me to compose any kind of document with my voice. I realized that the biggest problem had nothing to do with some special technique that was required to compose documents with your voice. The main difference was that I was now much more comfortable dictating with Dragon -- and I was less self-conscious about what I was writing.

The other thing I realized was that is my skills using Dragon improved, I got to the point where I could edit a document with my voice faster than I could with the keyboard. With the release of Dragon 10, we added some new formatting capabilities that make it even easier to use your voice to edit a document. We added a series of Quick Voice Formatting commands that make it easy to format, select, copy, paste or delete a range of text very easily in a document.

When I reflected back on my use of Dragon after the first few months, I realized that by taking a couple simple applications that added value very quickly to my daily work, I could get comfortable with Dragon in a short period of time. Once I got to that point, I realized that I could use Dragon for nearly any kind of document.

I hope you have the same experience!