A long day, but ultimately satisfying
May. 30th, 2011 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterIt turns out I may have been needlessly pessimistic. My day actually went pretty well, even though I did have to scramble to get some of the notes for my calls typed in properly. The pain in my arm was not too bad, and I talked to some pretty decent people today.
I also learned that my supervisor's supervisor was impressed by increases in my performance lately, which is always a good thing. And, of course, I racked up the double pay for working on Memorial Day.
Of course, I am feeling rather worn out at the end of the day—walking around in constant low-level pain will do that to you—and I am really glad to be home. But the funny thing is, in a way I'm almost glad this happened. If it hadn't, I would never have gotten around to experimenting with Windows speech recognition.
And this speech recognition system is almost amazing enough to make me forget about the broken arm altogether. It is getting more and more accurate the more I work with it, and I find that I can often just speak naturally and it will recognize almost everything I say correctly. For instance, I just said that entire last sentence, and it did not miss a single word in it. (And that one.)
With this system, I'm able to communicate almost as fast and easily as I could when I was typing 100 words per minute. I don't have the frustration of trying to type everything in one-handed and messing half the letters up because I'm looking at the keyboard instead of the screen. Even for those applications in which speech recognition does not work, I can just speak it into a notepad and then say "select all" and "copy" and then click over in the other window and paste it with a mouse button. It's like having a neat new toy to make up for the pain of the broken arm.
And it's really funny how accurate this program is getting. Even when it makes a mistake, when I tell it to correct the mistake one of the default guesses it has is invariably the correct thing I meant to say. There are even some programs, like Microsoft Live Writer, where I find speaking the commands is actually easier than clicking them as I have to take my hands off the keyboard and move the mouse over to some tiny little place to change some fiddly little setting and then move it back again.
Anyway, that's how my day went. Looking forward to calling the orthopedist tomorrow and getting an appointment set up to get a real cast put on his arm.
I also learned that my supervisor's supervisor was impressed by increases in my performance lately, which is always a good thing. And, of course, I racked up the double pay for working on Memorial Day.
Of course, I am feeling rather worn out at the end of the day—walking around in constant low-level pain will do that to you—and I am really glad to be home. But the funny thing is, in a way I'm almost glad this happened. If it hadn't, I would never have gotten around to experimenting with Windows speech recognition.
And this speech recognition system is almost amazing enough to make me forget about the broken arm altogether. It is getting more and more accurate the more I work with it, and I find that I can often just speak naturally and it will recognize almost everything I say correctly. For instance, I just said that entire last sentence, and it did not miss a single word in it. (And that one.)
With this system, I'm able to communicate almost as fast and easily as I could when I was typing 100 words per minute. I don't have the frustration of trying to type everything in one-handed and messing half the letters up because I'm looking at the keyboard instead of the screen. Even for those applications in which speech recognition does not work, I can just speak it into a notepad and then say "select all" and "copy" and then click over in the other window and paste it with a mouse button. It's like having a neat new toy to make up for the pain of the broken arm.
And it's really funny how accurate this program is getting. Even when it makes a mistake, when I tell it to correct the mistake one of the default guesses it has is invariably the correct thing I meant to say. There are even some programs, like Microsoft Live Writer, where I find speaking the commands is actually easier than clicking them as I have to take my hands off the keyboard and move the mouse over to some tiny little place to change some fiddly little setting and then move it back again.
Anyway, that's how my day went. Looking forward to calling the orthopedist tomorrow and getting an appointment set up to get a real cast put on his arm.
