Notes from the notebooks

So this morning I decided that the best way to start playing with the sound recorder in Audio Commander was to dig out one of my old story notebooks and read from that. This means I've got a written version to refer back to, in order to check the dictation without having to listen to my own voice, which is something I always find very offputting. It's also doing something useful, because I've got some notes and scraps of stories I might still want to work on some day which I've never got around to typing up.

First problem: find the notebooks. They weren't where I first looked, which is in the small filing cabinet next to my desk, which tends to get used as a dumping ground for Stuff. nor were they in the box of stationery bits and pieces on the bookcase behind me. I thought at first that I must have tidied them away before a parental visit (because who wants their parents reading their porn notes), and then I remembered that for once in my life I had been Organised, and put them away in the archive filing cabinet.

And that's where they were. Five notebooks, one of which was blank and one which has only a couple of paragraphs of a fanfic story the rest of which has completely disappeared from my memory. I suspect it's fallen down the memory hole which was the reason why I started carrying the A6 size notebook around in my handbag in the first place -- there were a couple of years where I had no short-term memory whatsoever, courtesy of medication side effects, and if I didn't write stuff down as soon as I thought of it, it would be gone for good.

( notes and ramblings )

rejection -- Ghost Train

And just as I finished dictating the previous post, I received an e-mail from Penumbra, rejecting Ghost Train 73 days after submission. However, it had made it past the initial cut, and it's a "please submit to us again" rejection. So while I would've liked to have found a home for this story, I'm not too dejected.

transcribing sound recordings with Dragon -- initial experiment

Just tried using the sound recorder function in Audio Commander to dictate my notes for " the Elves and the Shoemaker " and then transcribe it with Dragon. This should be a fairly easy test, as all I'm doing is reading aloud existing handwritten notes. On the other hand, I had to stop on occasions to actually try work what my handwritten notes said. :-)

3 1/2 pages in a reporter's notebook, which will be around 500 words with my handwriting. It took about four minutes to dictate, and 2 or 3 minutes to transcribe, and about 15 minutes to do the corrections... that's rather annoying, particularly as the high error rate is actually higher than I'm achieving most of the time now with dictating blog posts. On the other hand, it will get better as Dragon hears more of my fiction, and part of the problem is that my current computer is pretty much as low a spec as you can get away with and still run Dragon at all. So it's a trade off between speed of recognition and accuracy of recognition, and the install wizard quite rightly went for speed over accuracy. Speed is more important for live dictation, but as it's irrelevant for transcribing a recording, I might fiddle with the settings when I'm doing transcribing.

Dragon does have its own sound recorder built in, which you can use while doing corrections to play back what you said, but in the lower editions this will hold the sound file only until you close the DragonPad document/Dragon itself (still haven't quite worked out which it is). You need to cough up for Professional or its variants to get the facility to save the .wav file permanently so you can transcribe it later.

Conclusions from a brief experiment, then:

The sound file from Audio Commander is usable with Dragon, and at the default sampling rate of 11025 Hz. On my elderly laptop the recognition error rate is pretty high, but certainly acceptable for copy typing in situations where I might not be able to type. It would also be usable for jotting down notes and scraps of dialogue, at least if I could get over my horror at having to listen to my own voice on playback. This might sound daft if you've never tried it, but a couple of my writer friends have also mentioned having the same sort of problem with it. It is actually very disconcerting to listen to your own voice on playback if you're not used to it, as it inevitably sounds different the way you normally hear yourself.

I've saved both the raw transcript and the corrected version as separate files, and might put them online in Google Docs at some point if anyone wants to do a compare and contrast -- it's a useful demonstration of both the types of error and the number of errors.