ViaVoice, too

Jeff took this picture of lichen with his new camera.


Yay, we had some sun this afternoon! After doing a Snoopy dance, I sat on the dock with Jeff's iPod, listening to the Grateful Dead, Ookla the Mok, Jim Boggia, Hawksley Workman, and Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff (I never ever get tired of listening to their "Manhattan Sleeps" album). Looking forward to getting my copy of Ookla The Mok's CD, "OH OK L.A.", which will hopefully be waiting for me when I get home next week. Allison has already posted her comments in her Livejournal, for those interested. I WANT!!

ViaVoice example

Some of you may be interested in the nuts and bolts of the editing process using ViaVoice. Others of you may not be, but I am going to force you to read through the incredibly tedious process anyway because you are my friends. Ok, some of you may not be my friends. Even Jeff will probably skip the rest of this Blathering since I know listening to my ViaVoice sessions drives him crazy ("agonizing" is the word he used).

Anyway, here is a brief real-life example (though not so brief explanation).

The goal sentence: "I'm glad it worked, too."

What ViaVoice first typed out according to my dictation:

I'm glad it worked, 2.

I say: "Correct '2'".

Unfortunately I use slightly incorrect intonation, and ViaVoice does not realize I am giving it a command rather than dictating, so it changes the sentence to:

I'm glad it worked, correct 2.

There is an option in ViaVoice where you can force ViaVoice to interpret everything as dictation unless you insert a certain command word at the front of your sentence, like "Computer". I might eventually resort to this, but I think it would drive me crazy eventually.

So I say: "Scratch that." This is supposed to be like the "Undo" command, and in this case it works. I find that it often seems cruelly random in its decision on how much of your mistake it wants to fix. Fortunately, it seems to cooperate in this case this time. So we're at our original sentence again:

I'm glad it worked, 2.

I say: "Correct '2'". This time I make sure not to pause between the two words, which seems to do the trick.

ViaVoice pauses, then highlights the word '2'. If there are any other words sounding like '2' earlier in the paragraph, it highlights them first, and I have to repeat the command until it highlights the word I want to correct.

ViaVoice opens a Correction Window after another pause. Ordinarily, this window should contain possible alternatives to the word '2' (two, too, to etc.). Sometimes, like this time, something goes wrong and the correction window is blank. I've told the support people at ViaVoice about this. After initially suggesting that this scenario could not possibly happen, they gave me suggestions on what to do, none of which worked. Since my 1 month of free support has expired, I'm hesitant to contact them again since I don't want to have to pay for advice that won't work.

I try saying "too" again in vain hope. This time, ViaVoice changes '2' to 'to'. I say "Correct 'to'" in hopes that this time the correction window will function correctly.

I'm glad it worked, to.

My hope is in vain, and the correction window remains blank.

At this point, to avoid using my arms, I have to go into spell mode by saying, "Begin Spell", and then spelling out each letter. I can't go too fast because if I do and ViaVoice screws up, editing is even more of a pain. So I say each letter and then paused until the letter actually appears: "T" (pause) "O" (pause) "O" (pause) "End Spell" (pause).

As you can imagine, it's often too easy to give in to the impulse to just use the keyboard for editing. Sometimes using the keyboard is unavoidable anyway, because of instances when ViaVoice inexplicably quits without warning, or the microphone stops working, or the correction window will close despite repeated requests to "close correction window".

In this example, ViaVoice only went spastic once during the editing process, and it ends up taking me about 3 minutes, 20 seconds to finally end up with the sentence:

I'm glad it worked, too.

I'm learning a lot of patience using ViaVoice. My friends are also learning to accept bizarre typos in my personal e-mail messages. :-)

(This entry was written with ViaVoice, a voice recognition program, which sometimes has its own sense of humor. Please forgive any spelling or grammar quirks which Debbie has missed while editing. Thank you. )

May/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ