Lily’s weekly blog 2!
Here we are, one week later with another blog post! I think it will be rather short, because there isn’t that much news I have to tell. None on the writing front as such, at least. I still haven’t finished anything new, but then, well, it has only been a week.
On the dictation front, however, I have to say I’m very pleased to say that the promised increase in productivity seems to hold true! I’ve been consistently dictating little journal entries for the past week, and even if it’s just 10 to 15 minutes, that can easily run up to over a thousand, maybe even two thousand words, which is a lot faster than I can type. So if I can translate that to reasonably finished fiction, that would give me the chance to increase my productivity by a lot!
It’s a very exciting possibility, but so far, we are only practicing with non-fiction things, where maybe I’m not quite as precious about exact formulations and the words I use and the order in which I put them in and all of that. I do a lot of my editing while writing in my head, and translating that into dictation might be a bit of a challenge.
On the other hand, it ought to do quite a lot for the storytelling part of fiction, I think. If I can get into the habit of it, it might add to my voice and make for very readable fiction.
We will, hopefully, find out one day! Currently, I’m not there yet. It is proving difficult enough to formulate a blog post right now where I’m not quite rambling as much as I do in my private little journal entries.
On the technological side of this whole endeavor, I have found that the voice-to-text transcription option in Google Docs is quite accurate. It’s very good, really, considering it’s a free option, it’s not trained to me, I have an accent. But, no, the accuracy, I have found, is higher than the one in using the dictation function in the free Microsoft Word, online, Office 365 I think it’s called officially.
It could be a question of audio quality. But I’ve done a few entries going on walks now, and I still think the Google one is better. (Editing Lily here: So I say, and then for whatever reason the transcription missed most of those last two sentences!)
Obviously, the ones I record at home, where it’s quiet, are the best, the most accurate. But even walking, I get fairly good results, considering I’m doing all of this on a zero-Euro budget. Maybe next week, I’ll talk more about how exactly I’m going about it, in case that is ever interesting to anyone. I certainly haven’t found a whole lot of resources aside from Anderson’s book on this. Especially on the learning-curve part, the part where you learn the actual dictation skill, how to turn the idea into a real thing. There’s a lot of advice on the technological side, but, yes, not so much on how to go about training for it. if you do search dictation practice online, invariably 90% of the things you find are resources for children doing dictation exercises. Which is not what I need. So, yes, I will continue with this and see where it leads me. Hopefully, too many finished books at some point in the future, that would be lovely! For now I’m going to leave it here, and I will see you next week!