Earlier this week I broke my right hand playing basketball. I currently have a splint on, which renders my right hand useless. I can wiggle the tips of my fingers but I lack the control to use a mouse or type with this lame hand. I'm getting proficient typing with my left hand, but it is still significantly slower than typing with both. For instance, with both hands I can type in the neighborhood of 100-120 words per minute. With just my left, I type a shade under 40 words per minute, and even slower when keying in typical code syntax with its mix of punctuation and case changes. (Thank God for IntelliSense!)
On Thursday I bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking from my local Fry's. NaturallySpeaking a popular voice recognition software package. I opted for the Standard Edition, which set me back $100. Not having had experience with voice recognition software in the past, I was a bit skeptical at how accurate such software could be. I knew it would not suffice for coding, but my hope was that it would make a good substitute for writing e-mails and authoring articles. So far, I have been pleasantly surprised with the accuracy and ease of use. The marketing literature claims over 99% accuracy. I have no clue how accurate it truly is, but keep in mind that even with 99% accuracy that still means that there will be one error every 100 words you utter. And if you are as verbose as I am, 100 words comes very quickly. Every couple of sentences there are one or two corrections I have to go back and make with my keyboard or voice commands.
Speaking of using voice recognition software for coding, I did try writing a little bit of code with my voice. My only foray into this was with a simple "Hello, world" example. What I intended to write was:
Response.Write("Hello, world!");
I said: "response", "period", "write", "open parenthesis", "open quote", "cap hello", "comma", "world", "exclamation point", "close parenthesis", "semi-colon". What I got was:
Response. Right ("Hello, world!");
Close, but no cigar. One of the main problems is that the software injects spaces where it thinks they are needed when speaking English, not when being parsed by a programming language. Moreover, it has trouble with homonyms at times. Note how it chose to use "Right" instead of "write".
In addition to writing text with your voice you can also use Dragon naturally speaking to issue a computer command such as copy, paste, formatting, and other common commands. The copy and paste features are quite useful, but what can be frustrating is when you say a word to type that to also maps to a command, such as "print" or "close".
All in all, I'd recommend using Dragon NaturallySpeaking or some other voice recognition software for people with some sort of typing impairment who spend much of their day sitting in front of a computer responding to e-mails or writing articles or other documents. It takes some getting used to, and there certainly are errors that you have to put up with, but it is a lot more efficient than typing with one hand and allows you to keep that one good hand on the mouse most of the time.
One warning regarding Dragon NaturallySpeaking: the software does not natively support 64-bit operating systems (although there is a workaround), and certain onboard sound cards are not recognized by the software without a bit of a workaround. I'll discuss some of the challenges I had installing Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and the steps I took to surmount those challenges in: Installing Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) on Vista / Windows Server 2008 64-Bit.