Sun Oct 16 02:30:10 UTC 2022 ========================================= # # Location: Home # Input Device: Dictation and manual correction # Audio: Silence # Visual: Messy Desk # Energy: Medium High # Mental: Alert # Emotional: Nervous and Fidgety # ========================================= It's still happening. When I talk too fast or too long the dictation software on the Macintosh will abruptly delete everything. It's very distressing and it upsets me a bit. Alternative to dictation would be something like the chorda- key keyboard that I have seen online. This keyboard works by users pressing a chord or multiple keys at once and software determines what possible words you might be trying to type. I'm not a huge fan of this idea because I don't tend to have much luck with algorithms guessing what words I'm trying to use. I really dislike using the same word multiple times in an email and then a longer document I try to keep things from repeating too frequently, or predictably. I spent about three hours this evening researching possible solutions that weren't hardware-based. There are zero vendors for Apple or macOS specifically that do dictation. The operating system and Apple as a company have a pure monopoly on the technology here. The only other player in the arena is a company called nuance. Nuance makes dragon dictate, and this is sadly the only player in the window space. Until 2018 dragon dictate also worked in macOS. I believe it was around this time that the Apple dictation features were rolled out. I can see why a company that sells a $200 for home users $500 for professional home users product would be upset by this, but the two products or I guess APIs whatever you would call them are not identical and do not provide similar service. Dragon dictate allows for an entire hands-free interface with the computer. macOS does have a decent amount of integration with voice controls for accessibility, but they are not perfect. So what am I left to do in the situation? I've come to a cross roads that I think is fairly clear. I can either run parallels a Windows virtualization option. In this way I can run the windows version of Dragon dictate and then I can dictate text without any error and add up to three times the speed of Apple dictation. The text is trapped in the virtual machine and could be transmitted via email or through SSH or the clipboard over to the Mac site.The cost here would be about $350 to pay 120-ish bucks for the parallel software and $200 plus tax for the dragon dictate software. The alternative to this rather pricey solution would be to except that the text it's taped when I am talking is ethereal and ephemeral. So I cannot be sure that it will be remaining on the screen once I finish talking.What I end up having to do is speak a few sentences and then stop look at the screen and guess or gauge if it's done processing the words I've said and if so then I go ahead and double tap on the control key to stop dictation.It's a much cheaper solution, but it does cause me a little frustration. The biggest headache and the one that really causes me emotional distress is that as I've complained before my memory isn't always that great and when I'm on a roll I can easily not remember what I was saying or what I was talking about.Sure I could go ahead and just run a voice recorder and record what I want to say as an audio file, but I'm not sure how I would be able to pull that out easily. So this is a bit of a longer one where I complain about dictation again. L O L such is the life that I am leading right now. I'll leave you with a small update on my real life. Today at 1:40 PM at the affectionately called Marcel the Shell theater, my friend Travis, Amir and I went to see the latest Halloween movie called Halloween Ends. This movie Michael Myers is back but it's finally over, Jamie Lee Curtis is in this movie and it seems like it'll be her last. Well we lost a few sentences but that's OK. This weekend was the second of two weekends for Austin city limits or ACL a music festival that happens every year. They switch to doing it two weekends because there are so many people that want to go but there's no way to make the park larger and so they just have the event twice one weekend after the next.So the relevancy there is that with a ACL going on the number of people who are interested in going to see a movie and a movie theater is reduced so me and two friends got to go see a movie and the only other person there was a small couple or a young couple on a dateAnd they kept talking about what they were going to buy at H-E-B on their way home so we felt OK to make jokes about the movie which is always enjoyable. Well thanks for reading I'm not really sure how interaction works with gopher. If I'm supposed to post on to be board to let people know answers to questions or if people have questions they put them there I'm not sure. Is this something that other people do or are these posts insured are in encourage to be only one way? Thanks a lot I'll try and post again tomorrow.