A previous post chronicled my trials of Google’s voice typing program, and now that I’ve used it a bit more, I have some further thoughts.
1: It’s damn handy for transcribing something written on paper to a digital format. Not perfect, but very useful. I had lost about twenty pages of a manuscript in a computer crash after going a bit too long without a backup (a situation I have taken measures to prevent happening again) and voice typing made the process of getting it all back into Scrivener much easier. P.S., back up your shit.
2: It’s tough for me to use it as a means of direct composition via dictation. I’ve practiced thinking compositionally at the speed I type and at the speed I write by hand, but learning to do it at the speed of speech would be an effort.
3: There are lots of other ways to implement it. I can imagine using it while having an argument or a conversation and mining the resulting wall of text for useful bits, or using it clean up a rough draft. More experimentation needed.
