My Thoughts After a Week of Using Dragon

You may remember about two weeks ago I wrote about protecting yourself from diseases such as Carpal Tunnel Syndrom, RSI, and Tendonitis which are caused from being on the computer a lot.

In that post, I mentioned a speech recognition program called Dragon Naturally Speaking, and recommended to not use it because it hurts your writing.

You probably noticed that I didn’t really go into much detail on that, as I hadn’t actually what it’s like to use speech recognition software. As I write (not speak) this, I’ve been using Dragon for just over a week, and thought it might be interesting to share my findings:

Time Wasted

Before I go into what it does for writing, I’d like to establish that a lot of time will be wasted.

The reasons for this are a few. The main one is (obviously) that most people can type much faster than the computer can type what they’re saying.

Even if you type slowly, I highly doubt that you can talk faster, unless your typing is like that of a snail.

Besides, although Dragon is extremely accurate and I give great thanks to the designers of it, it takes a while from the time the word leaves your mouth to get to the Dragon processor to get to the computer processor to get to the screen. And if you speak too quickly, it won’t process what you said correctly and will mess everything up.

However good the controls are for navigating around your computer, they are still a problem. While before all you had to do was move your mouse to click. Now you have to say some programmed code that’s hard to remember and (again), it takes a while to process it. If you are going to use Dragon (which I’m going to talk about later), do not use it for navigating. As it’s unlikely that moving and clicking with your mouse will cause any injury, I highly recommend just using the mouse.

• Writing Problems

This is the big thing, and the one that has permanently gotten me off speech recognition software: It really hurts your writing. Although I wrote about this a little in the previous post on this, I didn’t understand just how bad it was.

I tried to write an essay with it, and thought that it would be fine. Huge mistake. My words were not in order and were not nearly as strong. I can only imagine how badly it would hurt your writing if you’re writing fiction, where that’s what really matters.

Although you can test this if you want, I would recommend that you take it from me when I say that it’s not a good idea.

• The Argument

Obviously, though, if it was really this clear cut, then writing this post would be a waste of time; no one would be using this software. However, a lot of people do use it, and the reason for this is they want to protect against diseases caused by typing such as carpal tunnel syndrome.

I did put this in my last post but knowing more about recognition software now, I think I can help more:

In my opinion, it is much better to write a published book and get injured than never publish a book and not get injured. There is pretty much no chance that you’re going to get a book published by using speech recognition software, so if you insist on using it to protect yourself, then you can write it out by hand and put it in speech recognition software. I can’t personally do that because my handwriting is so bad, but if your’s is legible and you’re just scared stiff about typing, then yes; that is an option. Just be forewarned that you will waste a lot of time converting it and most people can type way faster than write.

So, because of the reasons I outlined above, I strongly recommend to not use speech recognition software for writing a book.

Tagged as: carpal, carpal tunnel, carpal tunnel syndrome, computer strain, dragon, dragon naturally speaking, repetitive strain, repetitive strain unjury, RSI, should I use Dragon Naturally Speaking?, should I use Dragon?, strain, syndrome, tendonitis, tunnel, why you shouldn't use speech recgonition software, write, writing, writing strain