Robert Priest's Blog: Blogging not logging - Posts Tagged "voice-to-text"

my advice to young writers? Get yourself a good ergonomic writing set up. I've been going at keyboards like a frenzied octopus in a jetstream for over fifty years and as much as I loved the way keyboarding rescued me from the tedium of handwriting it does after many years begin to wear away your musculature. A few sentences of rapid keyboarding now and I get a pain in my neck. So I use a voice to text device for a lot of my data entry these days. It's not great for doing any kind of neo-speak poetry—for instance if like me you compose neologisms—it will just come up with whatever is sonically close to what you've said. You have to type neologisms! But for blogging—it's the new orality and once you've gotten used to it a bit can actually increase your productivity. Sometimes for instance when I'm writing my fantasy series (spell crossed) I'll go on late into the night. When it gets to that point where as a typist I would be unable to continue I can now put on my headset and with my head bowed down like some old court storyteller trying to get an insomniac king off to bed dictate away almost at a mumble. Almost at a whisper and get the job done. This all comes up because I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out how to work goodreads. Unfortunately mouse work is the thing that a voice to text device is worst at. entering your own books seriously requires mouse work. So here I am at 211 in the afternoon and my neck is already creaking. Thankfully I am now being helped by the gracious and patient staff at good reads. so expect more of my books to show up under my profile in the near future.

Another task of writing is getting an assist from technology. Sometimes when you've been toiling away at a piece sculpting it and trimming it for hours and it's getting on towards midnight and you're too tired to read it aloud to yourself you can do what I do. I have an option in my MacBook to send selection to iTunes. When I enable this the text can then be spoken by the machine voice. Which is uncannily better than it used to be. I can just sit back with my head hung over and have the whole thing run by me one more time. Receiving it a different way. Listening.