As a prolific online article writer with some 28,670 articles now, I am always interested in the latest and greatest speech recognition software. The first 10,000 articles I created were pretty much done with my fingers and a keyboard. You can imagine how many laptops I went through wearing off those letters on the plastic keys. Today, I am writing about 75% of my articles using voice recognition software, and I note that I can go two thirds faster in doing so.
Still, I would submit to you that it's time for the software gurus to better these writing tools rather than sitting on their laurels with only small incremental gains between versions. I say that because it seems as soon as you buy the latest speech recognition software, a new version comes out within six months.
They always say it is better than the one the prior, but in reality it's not all that much better, sure, it might be a little better, and you might even notice it, but why don't they take the next leap and skip the next subsequent generations and incremental baby steps of these computer writing tools? Let me explain.
Below, I've listed four things I would like to see in the next generation (giant step) of voice software. Perhaps this can be done at Google X-Labs to interface with their word processing programs, or at Microsoft to interface with Microsoft Word, and hopefully it could be used with Windows 8 on the new Surface Tablet. Perhaps a joint project with Dragon software, or IBM might be another concept. Apple might also get into the game with their "Siri" speech command software. Here is what I would like to see;
- Adjusting Reading Level of Completed Speech Documents
- Change In Word Choices
- Auto Editing Read Back
- Would You Rather Say - Suggestive Option
It would be very nice if as you were preparing a document, editing an Internet radio show, or writing a chapter in an e-book or even an e-mail if the software could read it back to you and then you could reset the reading level where it would give you new word choices, synonyms which would actually work in the sentence and be grammatically correct but be just right for a higher intellectual crowd. Then it would be good if it could read back the correction, and ask you if you accept that are not, all the while saving the previous edition which may be perhaps an eighth grade reading level.
You see, you never know when you are going to swap out audiences, and it would be nice to have both versions. It even be rather cool if the voice software might ask you after a long pause if you wish to change a sentence above, giving you a suggestive option. There's no reason we can't design software to do that, and it would certainly make my job as a writer easier. I'd buy it in a heartbeat, so too would anyone who is serious about writing or attempting to write in English when their native language is from somewhere else. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
