One of the aspects of the Note 4 Roadtrip which always worried me was how I was going to handle writing 1700 words or more a day for the NaNoWriMo novel-writing challenge. The answer turned out to be voice recognition.
Several comments highlighted the voice recognition option in Samsung’s voice recorder when I announced this project. I was sceptical, since my experience with voice rec has generally been poor. But I gave it a crack and it worked much better than I expected. In an hour, I dictated my 1700 words.
It certainly isn’t perfect. It adds no punctuation whatsoever, and it does sometimes go rather off track. I certainly did not intend to write “plus I was swift prunes”, which was one transcription it came up with. But hey, autocorrect just typed “feathery” when I wanted “rather”, so every option had its issues.
You can only record 5 minutes at a time, which gets you between 200 and 400 words. At that point I copy the text and paste it into the master document.
A lot of editing will be needed, but success in NaNoWriMo partly depends on just churning out words, and now I’m confident I can do that without a keyboard. An added bonus is that writing dialogue, a task I frequently struggle with, comes more naturally when I have to speak it myself.
Today I’m flying from Newcastle to Brisbane, for various radio commitments and to check out the pre-G20 lock down. My phone and watch are charged. I have come to terms with Queensland’s lack of daylight saving. Time to test out video editing. Tune in this afternoon for an update.
Lifehacker’s Note 4 Roadtrip series is sponsored by Samsung.
Comments
2 responses to “Note 4 Roadtrip: Dictation Elation”
Are you moving with a battery pack for this Angus?
Why do people still get voice recognition and speech recognition mixed up in this day and age?
Voice recognition is machine recognition of voices i.e. distinguishing one person’s voice from another without regards to what was spoken. This is mainly used in security systems, although it has not been perfected yet.
Speech recognition is machine recognition of speech i.e. figuring out what was said, regardless of who said it.
Maybe people should just stop using the phrase ‘voice recognition’ and use ‘speaker recognition’ instead to avoid confusion.
You could have just taken an iWerkz folding keyboard – its about the same footprint as the Note 4… http://www.amazon.com/iWerkz-Universal-Foldable-Bluetooth-44652WH/dp/B00FEYJP0I