This Is My Secret: The Blog and Website of Writer Kristin Cashore

I try not to make my blog Whinge Central, but this information might actually be helpful for some of you out there. So: I'm sure Dragon Dictate's latest version of dictation software for Mac users (by Nuance) is useful to someone with some job, but I'm sorry to say that if you happen to be a writer who works with manuscripts that are a few hundred pages long, it amounts to highly-priced garbage. The program is designed to be simultaneously conscious of every word in your manuscript, so that you can verbally navigate to any point – a feature I have no need for, but that I'm not given the option of turning off – and it's quite limited, apparently, in the number of words it can manage at once. If I have my Dragon Dictate microphone turned on and I click into my current 280-page manuscript, the software flips out, freezes, then takes several minutes to crash.  Every single time. When I called Nuance's (consistently appalling) customer service, I was told to dictat…

Wednesday was one of those days where you wake up and it's so dark outside that you feel like there must've been some mix-up with the sun. And it never gets any brighter, and also your hands hurt, but you have to do a lot of computer work anyway, and because your hands hurt, you're clumsy, and because you're clumsy, you keep spilling crumbs and splattering liquids everywhere on account of a person must eat, and it sucks to have to clean everything all up, because your hands hurt.

I depend on my dictation software for my e-mail communications and the transcription of my work. I'm inexpressibly grateful for its existence. BUT that doesn't mean that it doesn't make me livid with anger, even bring me close to tears, from time to time. There are just some days where nothing works; no matter where you put the microphone, no matter how distinctly you speak, it won't get any of your words right, and nothing works, and you have to use your hands. On Wednesday, i…

Note to those who are reading this post in an e-mail, or anywhere other than my blog actual: if you don't see the short video immediately below, this post isn't going to make a whole lot of sense to you. You might want to read this one on my actual blog, which is here.

Press play!



Note: When the VRS recognizes a word that I do not say, that word is shown in red font. The correct word, if there is one, follows in brackets, in green font. Similarly, when I say a word that the VRS misses entirely, that word is shown in brackets, in green font. (My apologies to any readers who are color blind!)

Hello everybody! This is your friendly author Krif[s]tin here, and I’m going to give you a little demonstration of my voice recognition software. Below this video, I will post the uncorrected text of this dictation. Read along, and see for yourself how well it works.

Stopover to become really like that [Here's how well the software works if you talk really really fast] about the[trains an…