Never Tickle a Sleeping Dragon

eleonorang

Most of you will be already familiar with the speech recognition software Dragon, either because you have heard of it as a great productivity tool or because it is already a common tool in your everyday business.

What do you find it particularly useful for? Have you experienced an increase in productivity thanks to it? And what kind of texts do you think are best translated using Dragon?

On the contrary, is there anyone who thinks it is not a big deal or who was disappointed by it?

I, for one, feel a bit of a maverick when it comes to Dragon, because I could never make it work for my needs!

Dmitry

eleonorang I have never worked with Dragon. I believe they don't have support for my language ? Maybe one day I'll give speech recognition a try, but for now I'm too accustomed to typing, will be hard for me to change my workflow.

Another problem: my texts tend to have lots of tags and often numbers, so it'll be hard to get any meaningful increase in speed when you're constantly copy-pasting tags.

eleonorang

Dmitry Another problem: my texts tend to have lots of tags and often numbers, so it'll be hard to get any meaningful increase in speed when you're constantly copy-pasting tags.

It's definitely a matter of text type and structure! You often have to deal with strings and short expressions in localization so you probably wouldn't benefit much from it anyway. In case of long texts and conversational style, instead, it's supposed to be of great help... let's see if anyone else shares his or her experience ?

Dmitry

eleonorang What about the punctuation, though? Can you also teach the dragon how to insert commas, colon, hyphen, ellipsis and whatnot?

eleonorang

Dmitry Absolutely! You don't even have to teach it basic punctuation, the first time you say 'comma' it gets recognised

Dmitry

eleonorang That's pretty cool!

eleonorang

Dmitry Yes it is, but you know what: I never managed to make it work properly on my PC - and it's not like I didn't check the system requirements beforehand. It's just that Dragons writes words slower than I would and in the end it makes me lose time ? I've never found anyone who could help me out with this (I'll admit there was a sort of secret agenda to starting this thread lol)

Dmitry

eleonorang Dragons writes words slower than I would and in the end it makes me lose time

That's a bummer! I tried Windows dictation tools the other day and wasn't that much impressed either. Apparently my silly Russian accent gets in a way A LOT meaning that I have to correct every other word. It might improve with training, but something tells me it's going to be a long and grueling process.