I recorded the entire book ‘Lord Allenby‘ using Dragon NaturallySpeaking – software which turns speech into text. It probably took longer at first to correct the mistakes it made than it would have done to just type it up from the handwritten manuscript I was reading from, but I persisted because part of the idea was to ‘train’ the software to recognise my voice and the manner of my speech. As I’ve progressed with the training, it has become much quicker, so that now it works pretty well. It would probably work better if I wasn’t reading from a manuscript but dictating straight into the software. The process of reading a bit, then checking it has correctly typed what I’ve read is quite laborious. If I was just reading what it typed as I spoke it would no doubt be far faster.

The only ‘down’ side is having to put on a headset to speak into. I guess that problem would be solved by using a better microphone than the one in the Logitec webcam that I first tried.
All in all, it’s well worth persisting with. A little bit like hard work to start with, but it gets easier, and once it’s started to get properly trained it really pays back time invested in it.