Today I wanted to run a quick little test with Audacity and Dragon Naturally Speaking.  Essentially this is a proof of concept test.  I’m working to prove:

• That both dragon naturally speaking and Audacity can operate at the same time
• that a podcast can be created, recorded and transcribed at the same time
• that regular amplified microphones can work as good as the noise cancellation microphone that comes with dragon naturally speaking 9 preferred (that’s a mouthful of a title!)

Here’s my microphones (The Tapco mixing board is off camera)

Understand there are times when I want to use the dragon headset, but when I’m at home, sometimes I don’t want the distraction or I want the podcast headphones on my ears and not the dragon headphone.

Here’s the podcast and recording of the session:

Here’s the text from my transcription:

This afternoon I’m testing out a microphone system running through a mixer board and plugged into my laptop. I’m actually running dual microphones, so I’m being captured in stereo is then routed to my laptop via Mono. (I’m not an audio engineer so I have no idea what I’m talking about just using the best words I can think of to describe what I’m doing.)

Why am I doing this?

I wanted to see if I could use the microphones in this way such that I don’t have a headset on my head. I’m about 6 inches away from my microphones which are sitting on my desk. You can call us and experiment. I’m going to expanding this experiment in the future to run Dragon NaturallySpeaking and audacity, a podcasting software, so that I can determine if I can podcast and transcribe my taxed at the same time.

After trying a quick test, I’m now using Dragon NaturallySpeaking and audacity at the same time. As I do this I’m going to stop using punctuation such as words like ‘Period’ and ‘Coma’ because I’m actually recording a podcast with audacity.

It’s a hard habit to break! Anyway this is actually working fairly well. I’m recording the words on a Word document with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and I’ve got audacity running on a separate screen I can see that my voice is being captured perfectly on audacity and I can see that my words (are) being captured almost perfectly in Dragon NaturallySpeaking. 

There is one issue though, if I slip in and out of a particular screen meaning out of Word and into audacity to pause or stop Audacity then my words are no longer captured in Microsoft Word as the active screen has to be continually open for Dragon NaturallySpeaking to capture the words.  It’s just a little thing but I could see some situations where I could become a problem.

So there’s the demo.  Its been a while since I tried something like this.  I had used the microphones before just with DNS9, and I had used DNS9’s headset with audacity.

Note, I’m also publishing this podcast through Utterz and then embedding the audio into the blog post after the fact. 

In the future, I suspect that I might use the headset more often when I’m traveling as its not practical to take my mixing board and other gear on a plane, to the beach and you don’t see too many podcasters on cruises with a full radio studio or anything like that.

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I was just reading over at Family Matters, who in the great spirit of the blogosphere was nice enough to quote arstechnica.com, who reported from MacWorld that Apple is picking up the licensing engine for Dragon Naturally Speaking, throwing out iListen and pushing in Dragon Naturally Speaking into MacSpeech in a product called Dictate (in beta).

I came out of the fortune 500 corporate finance world powered by PC’s and the Mac was always some obscure piece of equipment that under funded*(or over funded depending on your perspective) art schools tended to use to get work done.  Over the last 2-3 years, that inbred corporate perspective has been changed as I started to do a great deal more work with graphics, video, audio and web design.

One of the things keeping me on the fence from making a final conversion or at least making an addition to my computer collection in the form of an Apple iBook or an Apple Air (odd name in that I want a computer with substance as opposed to a box filled with . . . .) is the absence of 2 tools.  One is a better version of MindManager for the Mac and the other is a great speech recognition program, preferably Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Here’s the quote from the articles I mentioned above:

ars technica reports from MacWorld:

As Nate noted on his staff journal this week, MacSpeech has now licensed the technology behind Dragon Naturally Speaking for its new product, MacSpeech Dictate (iListen is no more). MacSpeech claims that, with Nuance’s speech processing engine, Dictate is more accurate than iListen ever could be. We hit up the MacSpeech booth on the Macworld Expo floor to find out more about the software.

First off, Dictate is not shipping yet (contrary to conflicting reports on the Web). The software is still in beta, and we weren’t allowed to play with it directly—instead, we had to watch a demo. With Dictate, “training” the software to your voice only takes ten minutes, the company claims, which will then bring the software up to 95 percent accuracy. From there, it learns based on your speech. Like Dragon (read Nate’s review for more detail), there are a number of commands you can use to correct errors if they crop up, in addition to commands that can be used to open, close, switch, and otherwise control various Mac applications. If more than one person uses your Mac and wants to use Dictate, you can set up different profiles for each person’s voice—in addition to plain ol’ American English, Dictate is capable of understanding a number of accents, including (as our demo showed us) Australian English. [Read entire article.]

My wallet won’t be happy ($199 - includes headset) but my carpal tunnel can’t wait for the release. Stay tuned, I’ll be talking about this a lot more.

Family Matters » » MacSpeech Announces Dictate

*  My wife graduated from a great art school called the Savannah College of Art and Design.  I do believe that art schools can teach very useful knowledge, skills and abilities that society needs for many purposes. 

** On a complete side note if you want to find a great weekend getaway I highly endorse Savannah.  Break out your beach stuff, and pack up your travel gear and check out Savannah.  I highly recommend it in April when the flowers and trees are blooming and the beach is hot but not too hot.

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