X-Message-Number: 33502 From: Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:30:47 EDT Subject: Response to Chris Manning: Dragon Naturally Speaking Content-Language: en Chris, Thanks for your thoughtful reply and for asking questions. I'm going to go at answering them in a different order than you asked them for logistical reasons that I hope will soon become apparent. This is also necessary due to the message length constraints on Cryonet. Chris wrote: I am intrigued by the fact that Mr. Darwin has the *time* to post these many long emails. I assume he would say that the time spent composing them is justified by the importance of setting the record straight (as he would see it). Mike replied: 'Wow, this is a weird statement. Information processing and communications technology are advancing at a rate that simply blows me away - and I'm not easily impressed. If medicine were progressing at 1/10th or maybe even 1/100th the rate that is being sustained in these areas, we'd all be immortal already. You might as well have asked me how I manage to find the *time* to post so much, given that using a hammer and chisel to carve my words into stone takes so long. And that's a good place to end this post, because it returns us to where we started out: the intelligent use of technology to improve the utilization of the most valuable resource in the world: human intelligence and productive creativity.' Chris Replied: I don't know what is 'weird' about it. I believe your recent posts must have taken a long time to type. As far as I know, George Orwell's 'speak-write' hasn't been invented yet, so I believe you would have used some sort of keyboard to type your emails. Possibly you are a fast typist. MD: Fortunately there are lots of people on Cryonet who have actually seen me type, because few people believe it until they see it. I type with one finger (right index) and while I average 60 wpm it is error ridden text and slow going. I learned this bizarre way of typing as a child, and numerous attempts at mastering touch typing have failed (something not uncommon, I'm told). Well over 10 years ago, if I'm not mistaken, a software program was developed called "Dragon Naturally Speaking" and it is EXACTLY the " Speak-Write program that George Orwell envisioned. It has gone through many iterations since its first release, with steady improvement. It is quite expensive - with add-ons such as medical word and other technical word recognition capability; you are looking at upwards of $1K. It also has, despite what they say on their TV adverts, a very shallow learning curve. The program must first master your particular vocalizations and speech patterns (something it is getting faster and faster at doing) and you must then master how to use it effectively. It is the latter that is time consuming and frustrating to so many users who can already type well and rapidly. I'm not in that category. The primary first users of Dragon were physicians who used it for medical transcription. Indeed; the medical transcriptionist is now all but an obsolete career. That's how I first heard about it, and how I got to try it out. Dragon is now pursuing the mass market and runs TV ads in the UK with some frequency. Dragon is great for "writing" documents where you know what you are going to say and can say it fluidly and easily. In other words, it is fantastic for conversational writing. Where it is nearly useless (at least for me) is technical or other writing where I have to struggle with what and how I want to say something, and often have to proceed a sentence, or at most a few sentences at a time. For instance, having to stop, check facts, check numbers, check references and think about HOW I want to say something. How fast or slow you type in that situation is not the rate-limiting step. Blessedly, most of correspondence is essentially conversational and is of the kind that you see business people in the movies in the era of personal secretaries say, "Take a letter Miss Smith. In regards to blah, blah..." Dragon is brilliant at that and I would guess it kicks up my efficiency by several orders of magnitude. Also, technical articles in areas that I have good mastery of and where the material is a tutorial or a review, can be easily dictated using Dragon and that saves a fortune in time. In those situations, I can write almost as fast as I can speak, and that's very, very fast ;-). Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=33502