Steve Dotto here.
Today, it’s all about dictating.
I want to be a dictator.
I’ve wanted to be a dictator as long as I can remember.
I have always desired the abandonment of the keyboard in favor of the human voice and being
able to dictate into the computer.
Indeed, we’ve had different dictation applications for a long time.
Some of them worked poorly.
Some of them were just awful.
But with the latest evolution of operating systems, especially in the Apple world, dictation
is becoming a reality.
There’s lots of talk about it around Siri, the iPhone, and all of that sort of stuff
so I wanted to show you several different options you have to become an incredibly proficient
dictator.
Now for me it begins on the Mac.
With the latest version of the operating system, the Lion version [phonetic 00:00:49] operating
system, if you go into this Systems Settings here, you will see that they have a selection
here called Dictation and Speech.
If we select that and turn it on, we can then choose what microphone we want to use in order
to use it as a dictation tool.
Now dictation works in most applications that allow text.
In some web-based applications it doesn’t work out.
For instance in Google Drive, dictation doesn’t work but it does in Evernote, it does in your
email software, and it does in an application like Microsoft Word that I have open here.
I have mine configured so that if I press the Function key twice, it automatically comes
up and allows me to dictate.
To be honest, since I started using this, I dictate an awful lot more.
It’s pretty even now with typing, especially for quick replies and such.
Let me show you.
I’m just going to hit the Function key twice on my keyboard and you see this little microphone
appears [comma].
When you dictate, you have to insert all punctuation yourself [period].
That allows the software to know what appropriate punctuation there should be [comma].
Once you finish dictating your message, hit the Function key again and it will them insert
the text [period].
Let’s see if it worked.
Not bad at all, really, is it?
It’s done just a great job of recognizing my text.
So that is dictation on the Mac.
There’s been a lot of talk about Siri, of course, the iOS 6 app which runs on the phone.
Siri is indeed a tremendously capable dictation tool.
Actually, it’s more a virtual assistant.
It does more than dictation.
It allows you to so some extra things as well.
For those of you have never played with Siri or haven’t used it, let me show you how
it works.
I’ve got it fired up here on my phone.
With Siri, you can actually tell it to do other functions as well.
I’ll give you an example: “Email Steve Dotto.
Subject: Be sure to wake up early tomorrow morning.”
[Siri: Which email address for Steve?
What would you like your email to say?]
“Be sure to get up early tomorrow morning as you have a conference call at 6 o’clock
[period] you great stud, you.”
[Siri: Here’s your email message to Steve Dotto.]
Stodgen.
[Siri: Ready to send it?]
No, I think I’ll cancel it.
I’m a great “Stodgen.”
As you can see, it’s fairly epic.
Do you know where I use Siri the most though?
It’s in quick little replies to texts that come in and out.
If I had a text like this one here, typically speaking I’m terrible on the keyboard replying
to texts so if you look down here on the very bottom of the screen, there’s that little
microphone.
That’s part of the same functions.
If I tap on that, I can say, “Let’s have lunch tomorrow,” and so that automatically
fills in for texting.
I find this way more efficient for replying to texts than trying to type in and I know
use this almost exclusively as my text replying function or tool when I’m using my Apple
phone.
As you can see, text recognition has come a long way.
However, having said all of this, not all of our iOS devices are created equal.
I’m opening up my iPad here and I’ll show it to you on the screen as well.
Now I have an older iPad.
This is an iPad 2 but I have upgraded it to the latest version of the operation system.
For some reason, Apple chose not to include Siri for iPad 2s that have been upgraded to
iOS 6.
Maybe it doesn’t have enough processing power.
I don’t know the reason.
But the net result for those of us who have iPad 2s that are upgraded to iOS 6 that want
to use voice as either a command or dictation tool within it, we have to find alternate
systems.
For managing the iPad, for doing things like sending a text or look this up, there’s
a great tool called Vlingo, which you should take a look at.
It’s a wonderful app that does great kind of assistant management-type stuff so it does
some of what Siri would do.
But for the dictation side, which is what this one is all about, Dragon Dictation seems
to be the best option to me.
It’s free and it does a pretty darn good job.
So let’s give it a shot and try it.
I’ll be using a little microphone, which you can see right here.
That’s a virtual representation of it in the top of the screen.
Let’s do this: “This dictation software does quite a good job of allowing us to dictate
on older iPads that aren’t supporting the new Siri system that Apple has on their newer
iPads.”
That was brilliant, wasn’t it?
So now it processes it.
So you can see that it does a pretty darn good job, again, of converting my voice into
text.
Now you have to come up with a bit of a system to get this text now into an email or something
like that.
If we click here on the little bar here at the top, we can email it directly, we can
send it out to a couple of different social networking areas.
What I do if I am going to dictate an email here that I don’t really usually want to
send right from the iPad, what I’ll do is I’ll email it to myself then I’ll copy
and paste it onto an email on my computer.
But it does allow me to some dictation work here on the iPad, which is again a great benefit
because the keyboard on the iPad, of course, isn’t all that great.
Overall, the world of dictation has certainly come a very long way in a very short period
of time, relatively speaking.
For the longest time, we had poor dictation software that we had to train, was very flakey,
and difficult to use but in just the last two years or so we’ve seen dictation software
just explode as far as its capability, not just on the Mac but on almost all of our different
mobile or desktop platforms.
If you do decide that you want to start incorporating dictation in your workflow, you have to think
a little more structure than you do when you’re working on a keyboard.
Your thought process has to slow down as far as what you’re putting out because it’s
just a different workflow as you dictate instead of writing.
You have to remember to put in all of the punctuation and of course you should make
sure that you proofread it really well at the end.
I hope you found this useful.
If you have, please give us a like and let people know that the Dotto Tech videos are
useful to them and their life.
I’m Steve Dotto.
We will see you soon right here again.
[END OF VIDEO] Steve Dotto0Dictation on Mac, iPhone0March
26, 2013
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