viavoice critique

A drawing by my 6-year-old niece, Annie


So I had a follow-up appointment with my doctor today. She was concerned because my arms are worse than they were when I saw her a month ago, but I told her that they're starting to gradually improve again. I'm supposed to see her again in a month. Sometimes it's hard not to get discouraged, but at least now I have ViaVoice and am trying to get my head around the fact that it may be a while longer before my arms are better.

Had lots of fun with Allison and Donna on Friday. Allison and I went to see a movie earlier in the afternoon, then hooked up with Donna later on, had some sushi. In the evening, we decided to see "The Two Towers". It was my third time, Allison's 6th time, and somewhere in the 30s for Donna. Allison and Donna are two of the most avid Lord of the Rings fans that I know, so it was fun seeing it with them. I really, really, really can't wait until the next movie.



Donna and Allison


Jeff had to work on Saturday, so in the afternoon I hung out with Parki. Very laid-back and relaxing time; we spent most of the time listening to music. He's gotten me hooked on the Grateful Dead. :-) For some reason, I always had the idea that the Grateful Dead were screaming heavy metal types so never listened to them. Holy cow, was I ever wrong.

On Sunday, Jeff and I did a lot of visiting. We drove to Orangeville to see his mom and to go through some old boxes that she was storing for us from our previous move. Next stop was Aurora, where we visited with Elizabeth and Bryan and Brianna; Jeff's first time meeting Brianna! In the evening, we had Easter dinner with my family.



Jeff meets Brianna


Several of you have asked about ViaVoice. So far I've only waxed eloquent about it is positive aspects. To be fair, here's a list of some of the shortcomings I have found so far, in case any of you are thinking of trying it out. Please keep in mind that what I'm talking only about the Mac OS X version; the regular Windows version may not be the same.

ViaVoice shortcomings so far

You need a lot of patience. Even though ViaVoice can quickly learn enough of your voice to be able to transcribe roughly, it still takes a lot of time and patience for you to learn how to edit the mistakes that via Voice makes. There have been many times when I've been strongly tempted to just forget the voice recognition and to make a correction by the keyboard.

Sometimes the microphone quits working for no reason. This happens at least once to twice for every hour I use ViaVoice. I usually just quit to ViaVoice, then restart it, and everything's fine. I had to do this three times during the writing of this particular Blathering.

Sometimes ViaVoice loses the cursor. This means I have to click the mouse so the application can find it again, which of course defeats the original purpose.

You have to plan out your sentences before saying them. This can be trickier than you think. I'm still not sure how editing my fiction writing will be. Right now, I'm still getting the hang of editing my nonfiction, practicing through these Blatherings.

You can only use editing features when the dictating into the ViaVoice text editor. even though I can dictate into Microsoft word, for example, it's much slower and I can't edit using my voice. I have to dictate into ViaVoice's SpeakPad first, then copy and paste the text into the appropriate application. I haven't been able to get the Transfer To function to work properly yet.

Sometimes ViaVoice quits for no particular reason. I have learned to save my ViaVoice documents frequently.

There is a problem with the VVIEController file which caused a virtual memory leak as well as a weird problem that caused my hard disk to fill up whenever I ran ViaVoice, and even after I quit the application. Jeff was the one to figure out that this particular file had to be deleted. Not having the file means I can't use the "jump to" function in Explorer anymore.

You need to be in a quiet environment. this may be a problem for parents of young children as well as those who work in crowded offices. I tried demonstrating ViaVoice to Parki and Jeff while they were standing behind me, and their wisecracks and comments in the background while I was dictating caused ViaVoice to go through a spasm of confusion from which it never recovered (I had to quit and restart).

The ViaVoice manual is not very good. There are many functions, for example, that are not listed in in the manual, and can only be found by snooping through ViaVoice. I found that this applied especially to the editing functions.

Despite these complaints, however, I would much rather be using ViaVoice right now than not. I'm also finding that the process is gradually getting easier the more that I use ViaVoice, and I may even continue to use it for some tasks even after my arms completely heal.



Easter eggs decorated by Sara and Annie

Apr/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ