This age. Bizarre. Part of the bizarreness rests in how much we actually know about it. We swim in a deepening sea of information. How to cope? We compartmentalize. So, though, do those providing us the information, and therein lies another problem, which is a question of integration. Recently at…
We're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, right? Our newly deceased former president, Gerald Ford, will now be turned into some kind of hero. That's the role of the media--to say happy things to put us in the mood to buy the products they advertise. Therefore, the media…
Dragon, for those who are not seen it in action, is a speech recognition software. You talk into a microphone connected to your computer and the program transcribes your words into written text. For those of you who haven’t seen the process of speech recognition before (or those who have only seen earlier versions of voice recognition software), the current version works like magic.
Who could make good use of speech recognition software? Anyone who writes. That probably includes you. All of you bloggers, take note. Same for all of you professionals. For instance, I work as a lawyer and I spend an hour or two each day using Dragon.
I have worked with Dragon ever since Version 6. It is now up to Version 9. I use the “Preferred” version of Dragon 9, which costs about $160. The software comes with a microphone in the box. The software is loaded with a vast vocabulary of legal and medical terms, something to keep in mind for those of you who might otherwise be tempted to jump to the vastly more expensive Legal or Medical versions of Dragon. For most people, there’s no need to make that jump, in my opinion.
There are millions of people out there who could make good use of voice recognition software. Dragon allows you to give your hands a break, even if you are a proficient typist. Dragon works so well that it seems like magic. No, I do not own any stock in Nuance …
The following is a drawing from a Christmas card I co-authored 16 years ago with a buddy, Mike Harty (Mike is the artist; I threw ideas and food at him). In case you can't make out the words on the image below, here is a larger image to download. The set-up, from the…
I was recently discussing the Iraq war with a political lobbyist friend of mine when he mentioned something I had not previously considered: neocons and other law-and-order conservatives try to justify the Iraq invasion by saying that even though Saddam didn't have WMDs, he was defying UN-mandated inspections of Iraqi…