Spike, take a letter · 4:34pm Dec 25th, 2013
Merry Christmas to all!
I hope everyone's having a joyful holiday. I also hope you got some great presents.
I'm posting today because I got one related to my fanfic output abilities!
Well, look at that. Voice Recognition Software! I'm calling it Spike, because it's a "Dragon" and it turns my dictation into writing!
Get it? No? Oh well.
Anywho, I'm gonna find out shortly if this software works as well as advertised. If it does, I may be able to use it to produce fanfics faster. Only time and testing will tell, I suppose. There's also the possibility that it will be so inaccurate that it's basically useless, but there's no harm in trying.
Anyway, I've got extended family coming to visit shortly, so that's all I have time for. I hope you all have a happy (and blessed, if applicable) holiday!
~PRB
(If I can program this software to open Microsoft Word whenever I say "Spike, take a letter," this will officially be the greatest thing ever.)
I have been looking at dictation software for quite some time now to help me in my writing, and I have heard good things about Dragon Naturally Speaking. Once you have a chance to thoroughly test it, I would be very interested in what you think!
1646380
I might post a brief review of my thoughts once I've run it through the gauntlet.
Well, that certainly looks interesting. Best of luck with that, and merry Christmas!
Heck, it's even got green fire!
Yes. Yes it would.
Yeah, that definitely would be the greatest thing ever.
Spike is REAL
and also digital? 
Roboponies!
So did you manage to program it to do that? :D
1817208
Nope, sadly. It looks like you can only create custom commands for the premium version, which is much more expensive.
The program works great, though! I just can't do that one thing with it.
1817286
Aww, poo. And I'm an Android guy, so I can't even reprogram Siri to respond to the name "Spike"...
I've tried using Dragon for about a year, but I eventually gave up. It's good when it works, but too often it either
a) works extremely slowly after I leave the computer sitting for a while, so that it takes a full minute for words to show up,
b) crashes, or
c) steals the microphone so Skype doesn't work.
The solution to all these problems is to reboot, because just exiting Dragon leaves Dragon still running. And it takes Dragon at least a minute to start, and at least a minute to stop, so it's 3 minutes to reboot and restart.
Nuance is aware of how buggy Dragon 12 is, and their response is, "Fuck it, people are buying it anyway."
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I agree its a little slow to start up, but once it's loaded, I haven't run into the other problems you're describing. It's never crashed, and it works pretty quickly as I speak.