Comment by spc476 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spc476 | Hacker News Reader

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My best friend is a writer [1] and back in January we were driving to a convention. He was working on a book at the time and his thought was to use the drive to get some work done. I was expecting him to type, but instead he tried dictating the book to his computer.

"... and that earned him the name of War Thug ... erase previous word ... War Thug ... erase previous word ... WAR ... THUG ... WAR THUG! WAR THUG! WAR THUG! NOT WARTHOG YOU GODDAMNED PIECE [CENSORED]"

It was the most amusing thirty minutes of the drive.

He ended up not dictating the book on the drive.

It was only later that the thought came to me that he should have gone ahead and cleaned up the text later. I'm not sure how successful that approach would be.

[1] https://seanhoade.com/books-by-hoade/

Unfortunately speech recognition often produces results so unusable that it might be harder to clean it up later as you wouldn't be able to tell what you were even trying to say.

... or, for the sake of argument, the same thing by speech recognition:

Unfortunately speech recognition often produces insulin usable and it might be hard to clean up later can be just you and me I want to tell what you're trying to say.

Maybe my voice sucks, or maybe I should robot it up more, but this is about the level I usually get... it's okay if you're doing a quick search on Google maps and don't mind repeating it 3 times but anything more than that and you may as well start typing.

Anecdotal but yes sometimes certainly it sucks -- I find it useful when I'm in a hurry, so I'll use Siri and say "Remind me to buy milk, toothpaste, red wire." Most of the time it works fine. Sometimes it cuts short and creates a reminder "Buy," or completely botches the words. I've been left standing clueless in the aisle as I'm trying to decipher what Siri should've heard. Especially true in my native language, Swedish.

And that's another issue. "Well of course speech recognition works* (mostly, kinda, in quiet environment, and in about 10 major languages). What, you want to speak your language? Go away - it's your own damn fault for not speaking English or Chinese like normal people do!" For most languages, this is a non-problem with a keyboard.

It would maybe help if there was easy way to mark a word for fixing later.

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