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My new killer app for Dragon

Here’s just a quick post to say that, after 25 minutes of their training programs, ScanSoft’s Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 (even the cheap version) works fabulously, and it scratches an itch I’ve had for years. I only wish the idea came to me sooner!

For some time, I’ve been taking notes from books I read - tagging interesting passages as I go long. Then, I return and laboriously key them in. It’s almost embarrassing to recount such a waste of time, but the end product is valuable. It’s taxing for my wrists, in addition to being a boring chore, so the scheme usually only works when I get books out of the library and can assume I’ll never see them again. A suboptimal solution all around.

The problem was more acute with this week’s offering, The Innovator’s Solution (which, yes, I should have read long ago). My copy, sitting here now, is just filled with little page markers - a daunting notetaking prospect (and I’m on the 3rd last chapter, with more to add). It’s, of course, a remarkable book, as good as you’ve heard and worth reading, filled with insights and tips that are worth capturing. It’s true we know, viscerally, a lot of this stuff, having learned through experience, but often I find I can lose perspective and need to be reminded. There are probably a hundred things Christensen writes that are worth careful study. Who has time for that?

A few years ago, when I started this system of capturing notes, I looked to pen scanners to snatch lines of text, but their performance was just not up to this application. I considered a few other schemes, including that Logitech IO pen and others too lame for me to recall. (ThinkGeek doesn’t even feature those single line scanners anymore - what a failure!)

Techno-flail followed techno flail, until at last, it hit me yesterday afternoon that Dragon would be perfect for the dictation that comes from reading printed material. It’s not creation - there are no pauses while I think, extra movements as I amplify and idea or move text around. This is just pure dictation. It’s a wonderful feeling to successfully think my way out of the problems I set myself.

And how did it do? Beautifully. 25 minutes of going through the tutorials and I was off. Even the control settings and such are easy to use (though I’ve learned I can be sloppy in my pronunciation of “asterisk”). As before, I’m capturing the text in a text editor, using characters as a break so that I can later swap them out in VIM (I’ve become a regex fiend out of pure laziness). When typing by hand, I used the | character. Using Dragon, I needed something easier, and so selected asterisk as my field-break marker. I need to create a macro for<i>, although speaking “open angle brackets - slash - i - close angle brackets” works and I’m able to achieve some fluency. “Open angle bracket - p - close angle bracket” is harder (”P” is a difficult sound to clearly isolate). Of course I can take a different approach with marking and just swap it out later. We must remain ever vigilant against losing our pragmatic approach!

This is excellent news for the world at large, because that means I will be able to convert the handwritten (can you believe it?) notes I have sitting on notecards from all my business school articles. This was before I was into PHP at all guys, so just settle down.

So keep an eye out probably Monday when I roll out the release of my oft-rescheduled repository of business, strategy, economics and other really interesting quotes and ideas. They’ll be direct quotes from books, but in fragmentary form, so they fall squarely within fair use. They’ll be useful for me, since I struggle to recall the specifics of anecdotes I’ve read in books. And perhaps we could do strategy quote of the day, just to share some of the wealth.

And you know, I think I might well be able to build most of this system myself. :-)

Taking this a step further, with Dragon performing this well, I half wonder if it could be an effective way to transcribe other things. I could imagine listening to a conference with headphones and speaking out the content. It’s not reasonable for everything, but it should reduce the effort involved.

There’s one final attribute to note approvingly: The Dragon packaging even gives evidence of a powerful lesson in serving customer needs. Headphones are included. I had just settled in to install the cd and planned on asking (nicely) for Mike to go fetch his Skype headphones. But I didn’t have to - my nice $80 software even came with headphones…. things I had been meaning to buy anyway but hadn’t yet. Way to deliver the full solution and get people started with a positive experience right out of the box.