Dictation

I’ve been thinking recently about a classic Star Trek episode from I believe the second season of this show; entitled Return to Tomorrow, the episode ostensibly dealt with the Starship Enterprise returning to 1968 to watch the launch of an Atlas rocket. As with most things in Star Trek, things didn’t go entirely according to plan, but the thing that struck me the most about that episode was an automatic typewriter. While it wasn’t incredibly integral to the plot of the show, I was fascinated with this idea that somebody could simply speak to a typewriter and it would correctly, essentially, capture the dictation on every page. Back when I first saw the show sometime in the mid 70s, that was actually pretty spectacular —especially because there didn’t appear to be any sort of computer that was connected to the device. I know now that it was some sort of standard movie magic of course, but the point remains it was a “feature” I never thought as a young child I would see brought to life with actual technology. 

Fast forward to today: many of our digital phone assistants have been capable for years now of essentially translating what we’re saying into brief text messages that we send to our friends and family. I use that technology regularly, especially when I don’t want to type out something long but also don’t feel like shortening what I want to say to someone. I’m sure that’s probably more of a problem for those of us who are writers—my young friend out in California is very good at getting her point across with a few acronyms and a handful of emojis—but the point remains that it’s pretty nice having a digital assistant that’s capable of understanding what we want to say and more often than not correctly gets it right.

The reason I’ve been thinking about it—and part of the explanation for why the blog has been quiet for a bit—is that I developed something of a wrist problem and I’ve had to take it easy when it comes to using the keyboard. The doctor has mandated forced downtime, which of course is making me go a little nuts; for the past four or five years now, not a day has gone by that I haven’t been working on some project that’s required a few thousand words each day, so not spending any time in front of my laptop has truly affected my being.

I have been aware for a while that there are various tools out there that would allow me to essentially dictate what I wanted to write, but I haven’t really spent a whole lot of time working with any; honestly, I was a little bit afraid that I’d have to spend a lot of time training whatever it was I wanted to use as a tool to understand my cadence, the sorts of words that I enjoyed using, and even the kind of formatting that I did. I also knew from talking to other author friends who had had experience in this space the dictation allowed them to actually work a lot faster, something that I had a hard time wrapping my brain around because, again, I’m something of a keyboard hound and couldn’t really contemplate literally telling my computer what I wanted to write. I was also a little bit worried about how much editing would have to take place after the fact; what I spent all this time speaking into my microphone only to have to go back and spend the same amount of time cleaning up what the computer had actually put to the page.

The wrist injury—or whatever it winds up being since the actual diagnosis is still out—more or less forced me to kind of revisit some of the research I’d done on this a while back. In this brave new world of AI infused products, I discovered that there are quite a few more options than existed when I looked at everything the first time around. I don’t typically use Microsoft Word as my base word processor of choice while I’m writing my novels, but I do use it for all the editing and the polishing that takes place before I actually publish anything. The actual product that I use for crafting each of my novels is a tool named Scrivener which I’ve talked about in some prior entries; that product doesn’t natively include the ability to do any sort of dictation, but because I’m running it on a Mac I have the option to use the built in dictation Provided by the operating system. So, naturally, I’ve spent this enforced downtime experimenting on how everything works in today’s environment.

I have to admit to being quite impressed with what Microsoft Word can do these days; When I last tested everything dictation it was a little bit hit or miss and required a lot more editing when I was finished. With whatever magic that Microsoft has brought to the table with all of its investment and copilot, I’m now finding Word can understand even my (many years removed) Maine accent, though admittedly, it used to be fun seeing what it thought it heard me say. I don’t quite have all the ins and outs of it down yet; getting it to do italics—which I use a lot—is something of a challenge, but I figure over time (and assuming I continue to use the tool) I’ll figure out all the shortcuts — much like the command line tools that I use in my day job. Scrivener is a little bit more interesting; the work Apple has done doesn’t feel to be as complete as what Microsoft has brought to the table, so there are a few more gaps and a little less (if you’ll pardon the expression) intelligence behind how it’s translating what I’m saying. I’m pretty confident that it’s going to get there though, and honestly, even with it working at about 80%, I’m finding it’s truly faster than my typical typing pace.

Since I’m going to be using this for a little bit, I’ll let you know how it goes over the next couple of blog posts; I’m actually in between projects at the moment but I had my eye on starting a new novel in July. I don’t think I could probably do the whole thing using dictation, but until my wrist heals up completely, I’ll probably get a significant part of it done that way. Who knows; maybe this will allow me to catch up and get back on target for the number of projects I wanted to get done this year.

That would be quite a win.