One thing I wonder about voice recognition is the “control characters” issue. If you’re typing, you can make capital letters by pressing “shift”. A voice recognition system could allow someone to say “shift” to mean that the next word starts with a capital letter, but then what if someone wants the actual word “shift” in their document? There are a few work-arounds that I can think of, but I’m curious as to what approach the programmers went with.
There are cameras that can tell where someone is looking, so it seems to me that one input method would be to have a keyboard where you look at the letters that you want to type.
There are cameras that can tell where someone is looking, so it seems to me that one input method would be to have a keyboard where you look at the letters that you want to type.
This seems way slower than typing or speech recognition.
In Dragon you can easily enter control characters by saying “Press” or “Type” as in “Press alt”, “type control alt”. The same seems to be true of most keyboard alternatives out there these days, as is creating macros for frequently used phrases, commands, whatever, as you can see in the video posted by the OP. It took a while to adapt my speech to speech-recognition-friendly pronunciation (not just providing a corpus of my own pronunciation) but now the # of typos (“speechos?”) doesn’t seem to be outrageous.
In some cases a small set of foot pedals can also serve as keyboard alternatives for frequently-used keys like shift, control, alt.
I use foot pedals + Dragon when my hands aren’t up to the job of keyboarding (a week or two every couple of months). I also found Windows SR technology to be adequate for many things but have the luxury of access to Dragon at work. For me speech input is about 85% as fast as typing in sentence/paragraph formats—although there are SR errors I find a second-pass editing process to correct such errors is more effective than the equivalent of backspacing and replacing as I would normally do with keyboarding. My speed drops to more like 40% in programming or other situations where I use a lot of copy-pasting. Could probably improve this if I had to do it all the time.
I have tried eye-tracking input methods, including remote and head-mounted kit just for fun, and it seems just too cumbersome if there are speech or hand-based input alternatives. Although to be fair I haven’t tried any of these methods long enough to reach an improvement plateau.
One thing I wonder about voice recognition is the “control characters” issue. If you’re typing, you can make capital letters by pressing “shift”. A voice recognition system could allow someone to say “shift” to mean that the next word starts with a capital letter, but then what if someone wants the actual word “shift” in their document? There are a few work-arounds that I can think of, but I’m curious as to what approach the programmers went with.
There are cameras that can tell where someone is looking, so it seems to me that one input method would be to have a keyboard where you look at the letters that you want to type.
This seems way slower than typing or speech recognition.
In Dragon you can easily enter control characters by saying “Press” or “Type” as in “Press alt”, “type control alt”. The same seems to be true of most keyboard alternatives out there these days, as is creating macros for frequently used phrases, commands, whatever, as you can see in the video posted by the OP. It took a while to adapt my speech to speech-recognition-friendly pronunciation (not just providing a corpus of my own pronunciation) but now the # of typos (“speechos?”) doesn’t seem to be outrageous.
In some cases a small set of foot pedals can also serve as keyboard alternatives for frequently-used keys like shift, control, alt.
I use foot pedals + Dragon when my hands aren’t up to the job of keyboarding (a week or two every couple of months). I also found Windows SR technology to be adequate for many things but have the luxury of access to Dragon at work. For me speech input is about 85% as fast as typing in sentence/paragraph formats—although there are SR errors I find a second-pass editing process to correct such errors is more effective than the equivalent of backspacing and replacing as I would normally do with keyboarding. My speed drops to more like 40% in programming or other situations where I use a lot of copy-pasting. Could probably improve this if I had to do it all the time.
I have tried eye-tracking input methods, including remote and head-mounted kit just for fun, and it seems just too cumbersome if there are speech or hand-based input alternatives. Although to be fair I haven’t tried any of these methods long enough to reach an improvement plateau.