I’d like to share with you a new experience I’m trying this evening. I am staying at the Doubletree Hotel in Birmingham Alabama. This is a very nice hotel, and I highly recommend it. Right now, I’m sitting in the tub of the hotel that’s not normally something I would share in an article.

I promise not to share your pictures nor any video in this blog article, I would like to explain how I typed this article. You see I’m sitting in the tub with a headset on, and I’m using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 to dictate an article to my computer which is sitting on the counter top.

This isn’t something that I do all the time. In fact, this is the first time that I’ve ever tried this. I have thought about using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 lot was in the hot tub before, but those can be a little noisy, and I never feel much like work.

Today however, after a long day of travel, I’ve been driving from Charlotte North Carolina to Birmingham Alabama all afternoon, I needed to relax a little bit and soak in the tub. That said, whenever I do that when I’m traveling on business, I always feel guilty because I’m not getting any work done.

If I were on vacation, I wouldn’t think twice about it. Then again, if I were on vacation, I have my kids here with me, and I doubt I’d feel the relax much at all. I love my kids, and I enjoy going on vacation with the family, but it’s not necessarily a relaxing event.

So this evening as I was contemplating mixing a guilty pleasure with business travel, I realize that I may have a compromise solution that literally enables me to enjoy the best of both worlds. So I wired up my computer in the bathroom, ran my noise canceling microphone set from the computer to the tub, and I started to get some work done.

To pull this off successfully, I opened up Microsoft Word and set the zoom level to 300%. I couldn’t dictate without looking, but I wanted to try and edit my words as I typed. To do that from 10 feet away, I wanted to have the zoom level set in a comfortable height. I could probably get away with 200% but I figured 300% would be comfortable.

I also made sure that my computer couldn’t get wet in any kind of way, and I ensure that I couldn’t electrocute myself as that would be a real bummer and definitely decrease my productivity.

Now as I sit here dictating this article to you, suddenly realize that this is a great way to type. It’s easy, relaxing, and definitely a good way to collect your thoughts while sharing them at the same time. When I first started thinking about writing this article, I thought it might be kind a cute gimmick. Now that I’ve been trying it for a few minutes, I think it’s one of the better ideas I’ve had this month.

So if you find yourself traveling a lot, maybe you’re attending a number of trade shows and walking your feed to the bone through the airports, you might consider treating yourself to Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 so that you too can kick back and relax in the tub at night when you get back to the hotel, and still get great deal of work done. More productivity, more comfort, and no guilt whatsoever, that’s what Dragon NaturallySpeaking’s doing for me this evening.

Maybe to take this to a new extreme, I will try and write an article next month while painting the interior of my house and doing a few other upgrades here and there maybe installing farmhouse sinks and staining some of our new wood work. For that, I may just try out the bluetooth capability of Version 10 and setup my laptop in a safe spot (away from paint drips) and then go to town multi-tasking.

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I would like to draw your attention to some great articles on Dragon NaturallySpeaking than finding in the blogosphere. I would like to specifically mention, that I have asked for these articles, because I want to see and hear from other bloggers and learn what they think they might be able to do with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

I have a theory, that Dragon NaturallySpeaking could revolutionize the blogosphere. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the blogosphere, however I do think that if writers were given a tool that made it even easier for them to communicate and express their ideas more clearly and in more detail, their readers would benefit.

I think that I can apply this theory to the blogosphere, and so I want to see what bloggers can do with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. Your average blogger will tend to write an article that is about 200 to 500 words long. They will often quote other sources and articles to reach that total number of 200 to 500 words. Some bloggers are very gifted at weaving in their own thoughts and perspectives, while quoting other sources and other bloggers even.

I think that when they do this, they tend to lose their voice just a little bit however. I would like to hear more from the bloggers that are actually writing, as opposed to the people that they’re quoting, agreeing with, or even refuting. We bloggers write a lot and we read a lot, and when you’re sitting in front of a computer all day long, that can significantly increase the amount of eyestrain you experience just from looking at the computer screen.

So when it comes time to finally write that article after you’ve done all this great research, you’re already halfway exhausted and out of energy. This can definitely be reflected in your articles when we finally write them as we rush to get the thing done.

I think that if more of us bloggers use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to right, will be able to write with more energy because we won’t be as tired when it comes to writing, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking makes it so easy. We can take time to think about the words that were picking and choosing a little bit more, because when we actually write them they come out of 150 words a minute which more than makes up for the amount of time that we spent thinking about them.

I will admit that it can be a little tricky getting used to editing a blog article when you use Dragon NaturallySpeaking. But I’ve recently found some great technology that makes this easier to do, especially for bloggers and I’m going to share that in a future article.

So the next few articles I’ve published, I’m going to share with you some of the articles I’ve found where bloggers are thinking and talking about how they might be able to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to do what they do best and maybe just maybe do it a little bit better or faster, while chilling by the pool, or doing mundane tasks, or relaxing in wooden swing sets with their kids.

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For a couple years I’ve been talking about the benefits of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Now I am a PC (guy) myself because I came out of the corporate world and frankly I just haven’t had time to learn how to use a Mac.

A funny thing happened last winter, when Apple hooked up a deal to release MacSpeech on the Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 platform for engine. Essentially version 10 was released at Mac World almost a month before version 10 came to the PC world.

DISCLAIMER! Now I haven’t used a Mac and I haven’t used MacSpeech. That said, they are supposed to be basically the same voice recognition engine on two different machines. If you look at the capabilities listed by both they’re very similar. The Macintosh version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, claims that it can be set up and running within about five minutes. Last weekend at BlogWorld, I clocked the setup of Dragon NaturallySpeaking PC at about seven minutes or about the time it takes to get your appetizers at Applebees. I suppose it could’ve been done just a little bit faster, but seven minutes compared to an hour on version 9 or a week on version 3 seemed like a pretty good deal to me.

That said, here’s a great YouTube Demo from Prof Ramsey.

Here’s an even better tutorial by LifeHacker featuring MacSpeech with photoshop and firefox

Any software program that you can take out of the box and install, and then spend five minutes setting up so that you can talk to your computer and your computer will convert your speech in the text is pretty amazing in my opinion. In fact it’s pretty amazing in my experience!

Unlike the PC version which comes in a standard and a preferred software offering, Mac speech only comes in one version which would appear to be the equivalent of the preferred version of PC. The price is also the same as the preferred version on a PC for that matter, it costs $199.

I’ve covered some of the specs of the Mac version again, but just so that you don’t have to go hunting back through old pages of our website, I’m including them below one more time.

Summary from Nuance . . .

Nuance is proud to offer MacSpeech Dictate, the premier speech recognition solution for the Intel Macintosh. With MacSpeech Dictate you focus on what you have to say… just think it, speak it, and create it. It’s that simple. MacSpeech Dictate provides amazing speech recognition accuracy and easily works with the applications you already have, including Apple apps like Mail, iChat, iPhoto, and more. MacSpeech Dictate even controls your Mac; just speak a command and MacSpeech Dictate executes it for you. MacSpeech Dictate requires no more than five minutes of training and is as fun, productive, and intuitive to use as the Mac itself. Think it. Speak it. Create it. MacSpeech is Desktop Speech Recognition for Macintosh Users. Click Here for MacSpeech!

Features:

· Uses the Legendary Dragon NaturallySpeaking Recognition Engine: At the core of MacSpeech Dictate is the world-renowned Dragon speech recognition engine. It’s the brains and brawn behind MacSpeech Dictate’s phenomenal accuracy.

· Amazing Accuracy: MacSpeech Dictate will astonish you with its accuracy. You simply talk and leave the recognition to MacSpeech Dictate.

· Essential Command Capabilities: Instead of using your mouse to select menu commands or your keyboard to type shortcuts, just speak a command. MacSpeech Dictate executes it for you. What could be easier?

· Works with the Apps You Already Have: Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and on, and on … MacSpeech Dictate works with them all. And, of course, MacSpeech Dictate works great with Apple’s applications as well, including iChat, Mail, iPhoto, Keynote, and more.

· Minimal Training Required: With just five minutes or less of training, MacSpeech Dictate provides astounding accuracy and productivity. With very little time investment, you’ll be using MacSpeech Dictate’s superior capabilities.

· Comes with Everything You Need, Including Headphones: There are no hidden costs. MacSpeech Dictate includes everything you need to be productive as soon as you start using it, including a high quality headphone/microphone unit.

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I wanted to mention again that this weekend, I will be speaking at the Birmingham WordCamp hosted by Andre Natta of The Terminal.

WindowsLiveWriter - Blogging with any Blogging Software Has Never Been Easier

I will be covering how to use WindowsLiveWriter to manage multiple blogs and how to use it with WordPress (among other blogging tools).

Whether you write for 1 blog or 10, Whether you use WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type or Type pad or many others, Windows LIve Writer can speed up your work, polish your presentation and much more.

Image via Wikipedia

Should be a great event and I’m looking forward to it. I haven’t been to Birmingham in about 17 years or so, and I’m packing lots of equipment including cameras, tripods, a projector and more cords, cables and Cat5e patch cables than you can shake a stick at, just to be prepared.

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Today, I’m up bright and early, actually I was never ‘down’ last night and its not bright out at all, still pitch dark.  I’m sitting in the Charlotte airport waiting to catch my flight to Las Vegas via Houston to attend Blogworld 2008.

Its been a bit of hectic week and a half prior to this trip and the next couple days will very likely be even nuttier.  I’m looking forward to getting to the show, meeting some new companies, learning about great new services and of course making lots of new friends and maybe a few business partners.

I have a host of activities lined up after hours, but my official plans are pretty involved as well.  I’m packing an extra battery for my laptop.  I have a 17″ toshiba and this thing isn’t very light let alone with an extra battery, cameras and other gadgets.  If things work out just right, I will be co-exhibiting at the show. 

The thing is there is no wired power at the booth that I will be at and to run the demos, I’m hoping to run I need power.  Hence the extra battery. 

I tried to purchase a 6 hour universal battery at Office Depot the other day, but it turned out the battery wasn’t as ‘universal’ as it was marketed to be.

So here I am in the airport, juicing up one of those batteries at an electrical outlet, trying to keep my eyes open long enough to make it onto the plane.  I’ve got my handy neck pillow ready to get 40 winks during the two flights out there and then its time to turn on the charm and attention up to 110% to get some things done.

I almost panicked a bit this morning. When I first tried to login with my Verizon Wireless aircard.  It didn’t want to connect right.  I had 4 bars, it kept trying to do an update and then erroring out.

Apparently, I need to install some updated VZ Manager software soon to keep this thing running.  So that’s probably what I’ll do as soon as I get back, unless this thing melts down first.  Verizon Wireless is not my favorite company these days, so it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if things melt down.

OK, well, about time to get ready to board and then sleep.  Hope you are having a great Friday where ever you are in the world and where ever you are going.  On my way back, I was unable to avoid the Red Eye, and so I’m likely to be a bit worthless on Sunday when I get home.  I look forward to the Red Eye about as much as a water buffalo looks forward to diet pills.. . . .

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