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MrFantastic

I've always found it funny how strange dictating to a device is relative to typing.

I can speak to real person with ease, but talking to a device makes my ideas jumbled.

I guess dictation is a skill like anything else.

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> I guess dictation is a skill like anything else.

It is, and like any skill it improves with practice.

The primary difference I observe between typing and dictation is the latter requires more forethought and precision to produce a good result. When typing, it's easy to try out many lexical variations very quickly, because the friction of editing is extremely low. This is not true of dictation.

You may find it beneficial, as I have, to pause after each sentence and take a moment to formulate the next in general terms before continuing to speak. You need feel no urgency when dictating to a computer, and to have a general outline in mind of what you mean to say makes it much easier to do so without stumbling or hesitating partway through.

It also helps to treat dictation as a first draft, rather than a finished product. I gather that in the days when personal assistants still took dictation, they did so in order to type up a draft for review and potential correction by the person dictating the document. While we now largely dictate text to computers rather than other people, the method of treating dictation results as drafts for review still has much to recommend it.

A big part of this is that typing and dictation are very different from conversation. Conversation is free flow, very flexible to errors (since people can infer each other's true meaning) and interactive. However, in both typing and dictating, your end product is often meant to be read and so must be error free.

For dictating this means planning ahead to make sure that the sentence is well-formed. Have you watched yourself type? There's a lot of backtracking, erases and restarts. The feedback from dictating is also slower, which then affects your input rate. If you do manage to ignore this and speak free flow, even with perfect recognition (which is impossible even for humans), you will have to go back and edit grammatical and cohesion errors.

The advantages of typing are faster feedback (this is unavoidable as the computational needs will always be less), working memory augmentation and better nonlinearity for edits.

When you take into account all that, the time to correct grammatical and spelling errors, to edit for comprehensibility, I doubt that speaking will come out ahead because input bandwidth is only the bottleneck for trivial pieces.

As someone who hates typing on mobile, but also dislikes speaking on mobile even when it correctly and easily transcribes my voice, you're definitely on point with the "why".

With that said, i think voice can still be superior, but perhaps i'm biased. I think what we need is an improved UX. Voice can handle the free flow part, but imagine being able to easily modify the context of the conversation via a few simple buttons. Maybe an undo button based on some context aware value (ie, not just words), and etc. The goal being to augment our ability to correct mistakes, or change the flow of the conversation.

I'm a prime example of why voice "typing" is difficult, i tend to misspeak very frequently. When using my voice, i often need to pause - which then usually causes the voice program to stop transcribing /eyeroll. Regardless, i still want to see it succeed, and think it can overall.

A big part of this I think, is the one-way nature of just about every dictation system. I can talk to someone without having a concrete idea of what I actually want to convey, and figure it out mid-way into the conversation. Dictating to speech recognition is like carefully crafting a question to place on stack overflow.

Is it because you have to wait for an external cue to start your sentences? I recently had an experience where I had a whole SMS conversation with my wife (4-5 back and forth messages) without typing. And the thing that was jarring to me is that I had to press a button, wait for an interface cue, and then talk. All that waiting for external stimulus would often mess with my natural rhythm to speak.

Creating a document (memo or whatever) with dictation definitely has something of a learning curve. I haven't done it much for years but dictating something for someone else to type up (yes, I used to do that) wasn't something that you just did naturally. It has to be more linear than writing--especially creating a document on a computer where you routinely change text and rearrange elements.

Same here. I think the biggest problem is that you can't pause for an extended period of time to gather your thoughts, and then continue dictating to the device. On the iPhone it stops listening after a beat or two. Then you have to go through the whole process again.

I haven't had this problem when using the dictation functionality via the iPhone keyboard's button for it. Can you elaborate? If this is something I'm liable to run into, I would like to know how to avoid it, because I can see it would be extremely annoying.

You can speak to a real person, but can you dictate to a person while they're typing?

I would imagine the weirder comparison is that I can type my thoughts into a box just fine, but speaking them makes them all jumbled. I guess it's because I'm used to comment boxes triggering my "let's write a comment" mode, so I would need some time to get used to dictating them.

>You can speak to a real person, but can you dictate to a person while they're typing?

Isn't that what secretaries and court-room clerks have been doing for over a century?

Besides businessmen, also lots of succesful (print) journalists and writers in the 30s to 80s had personal assistants that they dictated their articles etc to.

Yes, of course. My point is that dictation is not the same skill as speaking.

Sure, but it's not much of a difficulty to master it.

Court room clerks, assuming you mean stenographers, are trained in typing shorthand. Basically, this lets them type at upwards of 250 words/minute. Something far beyond untrained individuals.

For comparison, you are probably only able to type upwards of 80 to 90 words/minute using standard keyboards. And that is, again, with training.

There was a fun article recently that went over writing shorthand. Journalists used to be commonly trained in writing methods where they could get over 100 words/minute. I know of literally zero folks that are trained in that.

I don't know where this 80/90 wpm limit is coming from but on a $5 keyboard many, many developers type 120 comfortably.

It wasn't meant as a limit. But, I think you are overstating most people's typing skills.

I do about 100wpm normally, but I also first laid hands on a computer keyboard at the age of six, and never really took them off again. I can manage 120wpm sustained with a negligible error rate, but it's a stretch. It's easy to imagine doing twice that with training in a restricted orthography that makes it possible to represent words with fewer glyphs - in other words, a shorthand.

The thought of 100wpm on paper, though, leaves me frankly amazed.

> The thought of 100wpm on paper, though, leaves me frankly amazed.

Why is it easy to imagine doubling your speed on a keyboard with shorthand, but imagining doubling your speed on paper with shorthand amazes you?

This is what it looks like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand#/media/File:Eclectic...

Because 100wpm on paper is far more than merely doubling my speed. It looks a lot more reasonable based on the image, though.

Not just shorthand - but they type with "chords" instead of letters. Typing "stop the press" is 3 chords instead of 14 key strokes which allows them to greatly increase the speed at which words are entered. As you mentioned though, it requires training.

[0] http://qwertysteno.com/Basics/Introduction.php

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