UKC

Not entirely unrelated to climbing – I have tennis / golfers elbow/s which I`m thinking is from two sources- one being my age [67] and the other being that I spend several hours each day, five days a week at work using a PC with a mouse, keyboard and tablet.
The elbow problem is affecting my climbing.
It`s been suggested that I might use some voice activated software to reduce using the mouse etc.
The suggestion is to buy Dragon Naturally Speaking. I work mainly with Excel, emails and a bit of Word. It looks like DNS will be suitable.
Anyone any experience of this and any helpful advice?
Other main question is – will I have to use a headset type microphone [for best performance] or are there other options?

In reply to John Workman:

Yes, I have a reasonable amount of experience with it. My Dad also uses it a lot.

You will need a good quality microphone (iirc mine cost about £100). A headset mic will do fine, but it needs to be good. Also if there's background noise, it can stuff things up a bit. If you're at home, you shouldn't have a problem with that. But I've found it poor to use in open-plan offices.

It's good for general composing of text and basic commands. I wouldn't use it for excel, it's just not very good at moving between cells and you can't really do formula with it. It'll be great for emails, word and forums. Especially if the emails you can tolerate the odd typo, as it's not 100% perfect.

Put plenty of time into making sure that you teach it your voice. If you just do the bare minimum, then you'll be disappointed. Spend a decent while getting it setup just right and it's generally pretty decent.

In reply to John Workman:
It's great, as long as you don't have a Scottish accent.

In reply to John Workman:

mattrm's advice is spot on.

I have a Scottish accent though not a very strong one and it worked fine for me. As mattrm says, training it up makes a significant difference.

In reply to John Workman:

Thanks for the advice.
I work in a quiet office - alone [aaawwww]
I don't particularly want to have use a headset type mike. What else can I do?

In reply to John Workman:

Buy a decent quality desktop mic, but you'll find that moving your head to be in just the right place for that kind of mic will in the long run get annoying. So you'll probably then switch to a headset mic.

Why don't you want to use a headset mic? It is much more flexible and comfortable.

In reply to mattrm:

Unless you wear specs or need to use the phone

I use Dragon at work and have a rather splendid Yeti Blue microphone on the desk. I am persistently impressed by how good dictation software is (even for medical work the basic product is very good).

I struggle to do the corrections that are inevitably occasionally needed without using the keyboard, so usually just ramble on and tidy it up manually at the end though.

b

In reply to coolhand:

Assuming then it does Birmingham, and Yorkshire accents ok, it should do Scottish accents , but then there are variations across the UK as there is within Scotland ?

In reply to ben b:

Thanks for that Ben. Just what I wanted to know.

JW

In reply to ben b:


I do both with a headset on fine. YMMV.

I'd agree with manually tidying up the document afterwards. Dictate it and then run through it with a spell checker and it'll normally come out fine.