You Talk - iListen Types

This post is being written entirely by my voice.

I'm not going to type a single word and all I'm going to do is go back and edit this. And I'm doing this in response to Ardell DellaLoggia. So, Ardell, this post is for you.

"I would like people to have the option to listen to the posts, while they are working on other things, and hear the meaning, that maybe they don't "hear" in the written word. More like radio than TV. You can get away with doing one in your T-shirt better than I can get away with doing one in my bra :) (And she put a little smiley face) Also, I know that many deaf people use the internet to "read up" on stuff and read conversations, so I don't want to turn blogging into videos. I just want the option for people to hear it said by me, especially for the reasons you indicate."

So I purchased a product called iListen. It's speech recognition for Mac OS X. I have no idea whether or not this is available on the PC side, but I have to tell you this is amazing stuff. I'm watching it transcribe my voice as I speak and it's doing an amazing job with the accuracy on this post. So not only does it transcribe the speaking, but you can train it to do all the commands as well and naturally it's got some built in commands like. [i say "PERIOD" and "PARAGRAPH"]

And you can see what it did was it put that into play, stopped my sentence and created that new section of this post. And I'm just typing, I mean, excuse me, I'm just talking. I'm not even trying to slowdown. It's really amazing.

It's a great little piece of technology and I think Ardell is right. The ability to hear my voice... speaking these words, hearing the in flexion, hearing the pauses, hearing how I put emotion into the words, can have at an incredible benefit.

Now, I'm doing this right now by recording what am typing on the computer, but I could just as easily have my Olympus voice recorder in the car with me or someplace else and download the sound file and have it transcribe all my words for me. This is what I had hoped to have happen with Jott. You know, we started The JottBlog a while back and Jott for me was a tool that I felt could really deliver on some of the emotion that gets lost in writing. But I think this does a really great job and again this is iListen and it' speech recognition for Macintosh OS X.

If anyone out there knows of a similar product on the PC side... I'd be happy for you to put that in the comments and please put a link to it. But I gotta tell ya, this is pretty amazing stuff. I'm really pleased.

And Ardell, I hope you're pleased as well. Everybody, thanks for listening if you listened and thanks for reading if you were reading.

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Listen To This Post In my Own Voice:

Watch a demonstration of iListen in action.