Sunday, November 30, 2003

The Computer Understands Me

I've been typing my mission Journal as you may or may not know. To date, I have 45,862 words transcribed. That's a lot of words. I didn't even think I knew that many words. I guess there are lot repeats though.

Today, I started using a voice recognition program called via voice. It took about 30 minutes to do the initial training, (although it's an ongoing process depending on your vocabulary) and I have put down 6,234 words through dictation. That's 25,098 key strokes not including the spacebar. I think that dictating to the computer is about the same speed for me right now as typing, because of having to correct the mistakes. I can already see the number of mistakes dropping rapidly, and soon it will be way faster than typing. It's all a matter of the computer learning my vocabulary and voice. As it stands, it will be saving me a lot of key strokes. After only a few pages of typing, my wrists and fingers start to ache.

I may have my journal completely transcribed before Christmas, but it most likely will not be laid out and ready for printing by then. Maybe a manuscript, but not a final copy. I'm planning on scanning enough photos to put one on every other page, and there are 77 pages so far, with 4.5 months left in the journal. To put it in perspective that 4.5 months is about 50 hand written pages, which is about 18,000 words or 70,000 keystrokes not including the space bar.

I'm getting excited because this little project of mine has been taking so long.

-Gary Milner, Transcriber and Dictater

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