I broke my arm a couple weeks ago. No, that's not the reason I've not blogged in a while: I've just been ridiculous busy - no excuse, I need to get on it. So I came down off the boat in the garage and my feet got caught up in the trailer. I came down on both hands, but harder on the right, breaking both the ulna and the radius at the wrist.
At first, the orthopedic surgeon thought an internal fixator would work. In layman's terms that's some space-age metal plate with screws. The break was more of a crush, though: the ends the two bones (in the forearm) were in small pieces. Screws don't work well in that situation so an external fixator was put on in surgery. I won't go any further as some people won't "appreciate" it, but Google will shed some light if you're curious (and a bit warped).
I can actually type with the right hand but, truth be told, it hurts like hell if for more than an hour or so. And in this gig, that means pain.
I decided to check out the speech recognition in Windows Vista and did some research on the web. Turns out there's not a lot of information out there on the subject. So there are two (no three) things to consider 1) the microphone, 2) the software, and 3) the platform. The microphone was the item I wasted more time on. The built in microphone on my HP Pavilion dv9500 notebook (a powerhouse) was nowhere near good enough - it wouldn't pick up anything.
After some additional research on microphones I decided on a gaming style headset (the Logitech ClearChat Style). It has a noise canceling adjustable boom-style headset microphone and fits over the ears and wraps behind the head. Its intended use is internet chat, music and gaming. It actually worked OK but the microphones kept me from hearing things around me and speech recognition wasn't stellar. So I reached back out to Google but from the angle of "speech recognition microphone". What kept coming up was the Sennheiser ME3 - it's said to be the best microphone out there for speech recognition. So, I bit.
I'm opting, right now, not to use Dragon's NaturallySpeaking which speaks to the second consideration, software. I'm not sure this is the best solution as I've not tried NaturallySpeaking. There's not a lot of information on the web on how Windows (Vista's, in particular) speech recognition works so I figured I'd give it a go before jumping. And besides, there is no 64 bit version of the software yet which actually speaks to the platform or the third consideration.
I can tell you that dictating this post in Live Writer has been a bit painful. Not physically, but that speech recognition is not all that wonderful. The Sennheiser ME3 hasn't impressed me or at least it's not leaps and bounds better than the $30 gaming headset. This paragraph in fact took me about 40 seconds to get written - with corrections. I guess that's not horrible and my arm doesn't hurt.
I'm going to keep trying and I'm going to continue to train this thing in hopes that it will get better. By the way, speech recognition has come with Windows for quite some time - yeah, in the box. You can look into it your yourself and find out some of the commands and see if you would appreciate it more than I have so far. I'll also be sure to post some updates and let you know how this works out.