Skip to main content

Avoiding Injury - Using Dragon in the Open Plan Office

Well, my overuse injury is back and it's quite painful to type. I'm not as worried as I was a few years ago when it first flared up because now I have Dragon.

The problem is that Dragon doesn't lend itself to the open plan office environment. We've recently moved offices and in our old office, I used to be able to use Dragon without worrying about bothering my colleagues. This is no longer the case.

After much deliberation I've found a solution (of sorts).

I've managed to get a Sony IC recorder and have upgraded to Dragon Naturally Speaking version 9 Preferred.



So, now to type longer documents, I take the recorder into a quiet meeting room and dictate to the sony stick. There are some other advantages to this as it frees my hands up for looking through other paperwork.

When I get back to my desk I copy the MP3 file across and then from the Dragon Naturally Speaking menu I select Sound then Transcribe Recording.

It is possible to transcribe the recording directly into an application, such as Microsoft Word, but I prefer to transcribe into the Dragon Notepad.

The reason for this is that when I'm transcribing into the Dragon notepad I can use my computer for other things but when I'm transcribing into other software, Dragon needs to maintain focus on the application and warns me not to touch the keyboard or mouse for the duration of the transcribing process. Transcribing is by no means a fast process, so I'm not willing to wait.

At the moment, the transcribing process is not incredibly accurate. I expect the accuracy will pick up as I experiment with settings and when I locate the dragon transcibing training facilities.

Comments

Kevin Pettitt said…
I purchased Dragon 9 (actually 9.5) Preferred after busting my left elbow/collarbone earlier this summer, and really love it. But you're right about the need to be isolated, so my home office is the only place I've used it.

I'm glad you posted this as I've wondered how well the dictation capability worked. I don't use it very much now that both hands are back to 100% (and I'm spending more time in the "real" office), but I know if I have any long-form writing to do that I'll use it for initial drafts.

Amazing how far technology has come. Feel better.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT? Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs. Notification can be; via a sound via a pop-up box via the system tray (where the computer clock is) The pop up box looks like this; Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off. CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client; On the Menu, click File , then Preferences... On the left hand side , click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options. Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving . In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications. If you untick the box mark

How to Create an Auto-Response Mail Message in Lotus Notes 8.5.3+

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly.  It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3.  I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified.  A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents.  A new window should appear. Click the action

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher