You’ve seen them, usually when people are on stage in some kind of televised conference setting, sitting in comfy-looking chairs and chatting with each other while wearing wee boom mics that have flesh-coloured pieces of foam on the tips instead of the usual black. Like this one below, which I grabbed from a current Ars Technica article:
To me, it just makes it look like the person has a large skin growth either on or hovering weirdly just above their face. It’s unsettling. To me.
That is all.
I decided to give voice dictation/speech recognition a serious try for my writing, to see if it actually works as well as its advocates suggest.
I didn’t want to use my gaming headset because I didn’t really want to wear a headset at all, if possible, so I looked into desktop mics.
I picked up a Blue Yeti USB microphone during Amazon’s Prime sale, both due to its sale price and its generally stellar reputation. I can use it for dictation, podcasts (if I had anything to talk about) and karaoke (if I want to annoy others and embarrass myself, or perhaps become the next Justin Bieber, except older, with better legs and fewer run-ins with the law).
This thing is gigantic. And it’s heavy enough to use as a weapon. A lethal weapon. But set up is dead (ho ho) simple and initial testing confirms it’s working just dandy. If I get some quality alone time this weekend (voice dictation is not something you want to do with others around, because it’s likely to bug them and make you look a little weird, to boot) I intend to give this thing a shot, probably starting off with Google Docs, as it has integrated speech. If I am convinced of its worth, I may move onto getting some flavor of Dragon Naturally Speaking (and how naturally does a dragon speak, anyway?)
From there I would also consider an app for the phone to record when I am out and aboot, or even get a digital voice recorder, which could later be played back into the appropriate software in order to transcribe my recordings.
It’s kind of exciting because it’s an approach I’ve never done before, but it could always be one of those crazy things that just doesn’t work for me, like touch typing, swimming or programming. I’ll find out soon.