How Dragon NaturallySpeaking helps me to be a more effective blogger

I do have a lot of ideas which I like to share with the rest of the world, but because I am a one finger typist , my inability to type quickly has always been a bottleneck. This is why I tried using Dragon Dictate in the past in order to improve my ability to create posts from my blog and content for my website.

Speech to text has always been a great idea , but voice-recognition technology was not very good, and it was quite frustrating to use this in the past. However , the new version 11.0 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking has been a very pleasant surprise ! It took me only about 15 minutes to make sure that the accuracy of recognition is better than 95%. This means that I can enter about 500 words into my PC in a few minutes - and then all I need to do is to correct the typos ! This will help me improve my productivity considerably !

Even better, I find that a major bonus has been that it has helped me to improve my writing style. Since I am talking into the microphone, it forces me to be conversational, so that my writing has become more reader friendly.

Since I am talking , the ideas flow easily and I can record them more effectively. This free flow helps me to ensure that I don't miss anything important – and also helps me to overcome the writer’s block which a blank computer screen often creates. Editing and deleting stuff afterwards is much easier than actually writing it.

The icing on the cake is since I have bought the premium version , it also allows me to record my thoughts wherever I am ! This means that even if the muse strikes at 2 am , I can still record my thoughts. This version has a feature which can transcribe audio files. This means that if I have a clever idea for a post, I can just dictate it into my Samsung galaxy S 2 using Voice Recorder save it as an audio file ( .3ga format) . I transfer this to my PC, where I then use Swith Sound File Convertor to convert this to an MP3 file.

I then allow Dragon NaturallySpeaking to work its magic on the MP3 file, so that I have an article which is ready to be posted within a few minutes - just like this one !