Monday was frustrating. Very frustrating. It was the first day I sat down to dictate the novel, and boy was it hard work. You see writing a blog is very much like talking to someone about your writing, or anything else for that matter. Writing a novel, or any fiction, requires you to think a lot more about what you say before you say it. So this blog entry for example, is very much written, or in my case – spoken, on the hoof. (I’ve said it before, you can get away with a lot more here. Try that with a novel and you'll only get rambling prose.)
I would say the other important impact on dictating a novel, especially a fantasy novel, whatever speech recognition software you're using has to cope with the myriad of fantasy names that aren't part of everyday speech and cannot be found in the average dictionary. So when you talk about “Count Ordrane of Draak” what you actually get is “count ordering of drought”. Or perhaps “count ordering of drug”. Either way you find yourself amending the text but also the dictionary to make sure it doesn't happen again... Which invariably it does: computers are clever, and they are so intuitive, but they are also fallible
On Monday, what with all the correcting and deleting of erroneous text, I managed to write 1500 words in the time it would normally take me to type 3000 words. So basically dictating at the moment is halving my productivity. I am not the most patient of people, I admit, and my frustration often boiled over yesterday. In fact if one had read the unedited text from Monday one would have found various expletives dotted around paragraphs. Or rather they might have been expletives, but the software could not recognise swear words so instead of the obvious, “flock” or “ flocking hell” or “for flock’s sake” appeared time and time again as markers of my compounded frustration. Instead of a book about vampires and Demons, it was starting to look like a book about the migratory habits of birds.
And obviously a bit of frustration here and there means I am less thinking about the text, but more how I can achieve the text without having to type it. So I guess the quality in this first draft might be a little hit and miss while I get used to using speech recognition software. I can later change the contents during the drafting process and it's something I'm not too bothered about right now, but being an impatient soul, it galls me that it won't be perfect or near as dammit perfect from the start.
Not that I'm complaining too much. My learning curve is quite steep and I'm learning very quickly how to manipulate speech recognition software to recognise my voice and so that I can navigate around the computer with the least fuss possible. In fact I should be quite pleased with the way it is going, you see my dad had one of the first speech recognition programs on his computer and I remember trying to use it; it took an entire evening to write a simple paragraph. That was in the early 90s, and speech recognition was quite quite primitive (though still a little exciting, after all operating anything by speech alone is the stuff of science-fiction).
Now the software is a little bit more sophisticated, and it seems to recognise most of what I say. It seems a long way from the 80s and I can't help but think of that scene in Star Trek: the voyage home (come on, you don't have to be a Trekkie to remember this) where Chief engineer Scotty is sitting down at a 1980s computer trying to talk to it to make it work, resorting to talking down the mouse thinking that would work. What I'm doing now 13 years later is a far cry from the 1980s but not that far from the technology present in shows such as Star Trek, and while this technology is not quite perfect, it's getting there, and with computer power increasing with each generation of PC, speech recognition software will become more and more important in our lives.
Until then, and until I can get this thing to work 99% accurately to recognise my voice, I guess I'll have to get used to “flockings” and “ships”, and try to control my frustrations. Like the British rail advert said, and with a little tinkering, “we might get it wrong, but we're getting there
-- for flock’s sake...”