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.

Page Popularity for Site: 32% [?]

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.

Page Popularity for Site: 46% [?]

I arrived home yesterday from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  I flew the Red Eye home (upgraded ) I found a large number of technologies converging around the concept of an improved user interface to the computer.  This for me was the most important aspect of the show and seemed to signal the direction of technology going into the next 2-4 years.

One of those interface improvements included a search engine that had a mind mapping interface capability (among several other views and tools).  I’m going to be covering these technologies and the impact and usefulness of these interfaces over the next few weeks and want to set everyone up for the topic.  After seeing what the show offered, I believe that this will be an extremely important transition in computing, possibly as important as the introduction of the mouse or even the color monitor.  Regardless, I think that these new interfaces will be nothing less than extraordinary.

In the meantime, after traveling for a week (and all the pre-travel prep), I have several mundane things to take care of this weekend including transferring and renewing my license tags, and finding a new insurance broker for my home owners insurance. 

Plus, if I have time, I am going to reboot this blog and with a new theme as this one is feeling a good bit stale these days. 

Page Popularity for Site: 30% [?]

This week I picked up a Verizon Wireless USB Air Card.  Its a little thing about the size of two ipod Nano’s stacked on top of each other and it has a retractable antenna for those occasions when an extra 2 inches matters.

I picked up the card on Saturday in preparation for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Super Bowl of consumer electronics and maybe tech in general.  Now, there are parts of the show that are covered with WiFi, but it never fails that something makes the WiFi go screwy when I need it the most, so I’m using this in part to get things done with NO excuses. 

My first impressions are positive overall, even though when I tried to connect at the airport after going through security, it took about 8 (plugins/tries) and about 5 minutes before XP would recognized/find new hardware.  Once that tedious Microsoft problem was out of the way, I was off to the  races and writing, working and enjoying the productivity.

The thing cost $0 after a $50 rebate and will cost $59.99 per month on my gynormous wireless plan, which will almost put me at a $300 per month wireless bill. 

Now it is almost twice as cheap to pay the early cancellation fee as it is to continue with Verizon!

In addition to being a wireless card, its also a memory card with a micro sd card built in.

Page Popularity for Site: 23% [?]

I wrote a week or two back that there was a MindManager Pro 7 update available, but for some reason I could not find it when I went through normal channels on my computer(video on how to find MM update availability manually).

Normal Channels being either me hitting the update button in the menu or having the program itself automatically check for an update.

So today when I went to launch MindManager 7 Pro (shortly after waking up!  ) this time I received a pop up window in the program telling me what I already know, that an update was available for my computer.  So I clicked on the button to get it and get the show on the road!

Here is what I found on the mindjet site after accepting the update.

THINGS YOU SHOULD NKNOW BEFORE UPDATING MINDMANAGER PRO 7

• You will have to reboot your windows machine after the installation, so install when you do not need your other programs running.
• You will have to shut down all windows applications and MindManager before installing.  That includes Outlook, which on some computers will run in a hidden capacity in the right task bar.
• Now the update is 82mb long, not super large, but not super small either.
• You should not loose your Map Templates built up, saved up and downloaded over the ages

If you can’t find where your Map Templates are located in MindManager 7 like me, just go to your tools menu, its the button on the right.  I always look for it in the formatting section and never find it. 

The Upgrade Windows preview so you do not panic

1. 
1. There was no virus in mine, you should not have one in yours.
2. 
1. I mentioned this above, this is the first time they give you this type of warning.
2. Note. they do not warn you that you will have to reboot your system.
3. 
1. In case you were not paying attention the first time, you may get a 2nd warning even when all of your applications are closed. 
4. 
1. I wish mindjet had told me about this one before I started the installation.  It is a common enough practice, but it never fails to catch me by surprise with many programs.

So all in all the installation went fine.  I do not know yet why it took so long for my computer to find the update, not like I was looking for movers New York to ship a whale cross country or something (bad analogy), but all in all I’m through the holidays, into the new year and the update is running.  I’ll let you know how it works as I use it.

Page Popularity for Site: 25% [?]