If like me you are just a two fingered typist, then typing regular blog entries can be a bit of a chore. My hands simply cannot keep up with the ideas coming out of my head. A great way to speed up your work flow and produce prose that flows with a little more grace and fluidity is to use speech recognition software.
A very good typist can manage 60 words a minute, but you could be delivering 100 words per minute as soon as you start to use speech recognition software.
Now you can go and buy a quality voice recognition program such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home (PC) which is really good at understanding you, but to check out what is possible you may prefer to try the free voice recognition software that is already installed in your PC.
Many people don’t realise there is a decent voice recognition program installed as a default by Microsoft in every version of Windows. To access it simply go to the start menu and type ‘speech recognition’ in the search box.
The software is easy to use and within minutes you could be dictating rather than typing your next blog entry. Not only is it good for typing up the things you say, but it also responds to commands so next time you have an arm injury, try out using voice recognition to ‘open email’, delete message’ or shutdown computer’. There is a cheat sheet of regular commands which is worth printing out to keep at hand when using the voice recognition software, but other than that, you are already good to go.
A limitation is that you cannot ‘speak’ directly into your blogging tool, but will have to open wordpad or another microsoft text editor and record your speech in there before cutting and pasting into your blog, but this is a very minor niggle.
If at first the results are poor, go through the training module which teaches your pc to understand your particular way of saying things. In time the pc will get better at understanding you and your will find that blogging becomes much more of a delight than a chore.