A Speech Recognition Conundrum for Old Folks

I while back I purchased Dragon Dictate with the fantasy that I might be able to convey my thoughts in the same manner that I talk. Anyone who knows me knows that I like to talk so this seemed like a rational idea. Unfortunately for me, the experiment did not work: I would sit in front of my computer and my mind would be blank; if I forced it then what would come out would be trite drivel. Then I thought "this is happening because there is no spontaneity" and I got a hand dictation device that Dragon would apparently then translate into words for me. Again, blankness and now the dictation device and the software languish.

I conveyed this amusing failure to a friend (wrs for those of you who know him) and I vaguely recall him saying something to the effect that "I think with the keyboard and not with my voice."

This is an interesting aha if we consider that having trained our hands to do the work of transcription that we have perhaps diminished our ability to use our voices instead. For old folks like me this then would be a natural barrier to the use of speech recognition: for it to be useful I will need to reverse my bias toward using my fingers. This is presumably an old folks problem in the sense that our children (if you don't stick them in front of a keyboard too soon) may find speech recognition more natural.

I came to this thought from another chain of ideas that I track - diet related issues. A friend (Brent) sent me an interesting post whereby the observation was made that we look for genetic causes when there is no variation in behavior. For example, most of the developed world shares a similar diet and instead of looking at the flaws in the diet we all share, we look for genetic causes for some of its consequences (heart disease, high blood pressure, type two diabetes, etc.)

Speech recognition may be suffering a similar fate - we live in a world of keyboards and the failings of speech recognition is that we type.