Talking Typing

I can't pretend that the regularity with which I've been doing this blog hasn't suffered since I started to write my book.

There was a slot on a Sunday afternoon where I would sit down regularly and recount events of the previous week. The problem with this is that some weeks there had been very few events to recount, and other weeks due to social occasions intruding into our Sunday there was no time to do the recounting.

Yet I love to sit and write. Ever since a story that I wrote at the age of six entitled "Evil Spirits" (if it were to be found today I am sure it would prove to be as blatant piece of plagiarism from some fairy tale as was possible) I have enjoyed writing.

Yet physically I find writing tiring and the end result is nearly always absolutely illegible. The many actors who have suffered my direction will recount the stories of my notes sessions. Having sat and watched a run through of a scene or an act or indeed the whole play, I will have in front of me at least a couple of pages of A4 covered with an indecipherable scrawl. There then ensues a process of detection on the part of both myself and the rest of the cast as to what these notes might mean. I've tried being a good director and not giving my notes until the next day having gone home to try to type up the scrawl into an easily readable document. But then I'm alone and can't read it and have no help in the necessary detective process.

I now have a little program called Dragon Dictate. Or to be more precise, Dragon Express. It's a free download from the Mac App Store. It is available for iPhones, iPads, and IMacs. Plug-in headset to your computer and you can talk away and it will type for you. It needs to get to learn your voice and your phrasing, but it does enable you to work at a rate that if you are not a touch typist would be hard to achieve.

A good solid hours dictation, allowing times for the necessary corrections etc, can give me 1000 words on my book. As long as I know what I'm talking about! But we will only find that out when people actually read it.

These dictation systems have come a long way since the mid-90s when at a live corporate event, my friend Janet Ellis and I were involved in the demonstration of one.

We were playing would-be hosts of the morning television programme, "Hello with Pam and Dick". One of the items was a lady called Pam (her real name just to add to the confusion) and a product that I think was called Simply Speaking.

Pam, the real one, had spent weeks training up the program so that it would demonstrate how she could just talk to her computer and the words would appear on the screen.

On the Saturday morning, faced with a full audience and the delightful Janet Ellis as "Pam" the television presenter, nerves got to the real Pam. As is so often the case the voice lifted itself a semitone or two in pitch as a result of her tension, and the machine started to have the greatest problems in understanding her.

We had only been looking at the thing for barely 10 seconds when a fairly innocent sentence spoken by Pam into the machine was displayed on the huge screen behind us as "anti-Semitic Nazis at Tesco"

These programs aren't faultless, but they have come a long way since then.