Testing voice to text

If you’re anything like me the commute home tends to be pretty painful. It isn’t the amount of time in the car, it’s the thought that I could be doing something a whole lot more useful if I didn’t have to focus on driving. I know, I know, this is the road that leads people to texting while driving which in turn leads to nuclear disaster and planes falling out of the sky. The solution is easy; actually perfect voice to text technology.

I’ve tried a decent amount of options. From services included with the mobile phone, like Siri, to actual voice dictation recorders that you can plug into your computer using a USB drive and convert to text. The problem is that unless you speak in short bursts the technology really doesn’t hold up. If you speak in short bursts it distracts you from your driving and you’re right back to where you started in a dangerous situation.

The other problem is invariably you’ll run into typos using voice to text. Some might argue that there are just as many typos when I type into the computer directly and what I badly need is an editor, but what can you do. The amount of specifications, documents, marketing briefs and press releases I could do during my drive if I had this technology would be huge… and better yet I can’t be interrupted while driving by my coworkers. Still, the technology isn’t there yet so that’s a big no go.

Radio gets old fast. I know there’s some people who still enjoy listening to the radio but the massive amount of commercials and random songs I don’t want to listen to prevent this from being a good experience for me. I do take advantage of Pandora, 8 track, and other app services that allow me to better categorize my music, but something doesn’t feel right about this to me either. I like my music playlists to be more organic and thus I usually wind up frustrated.

Audiobooks often work, but they have to be the right kind of audiobook. Some books don’t translate well to listening over the speakers. Jim Dale does a great job with the Harry Potter books and I’ve repeated those many times in the car. Harry Potter are not exactly great works of art, but they are good distractions and easy enough to listen to without fully concentrating on them. The search for good audiobooks is often time consuming though, and needs to be planned out. It isn’t something you can easily grab for yourself once you’re already in the car and moving.

Driving can be a good time for thinking things through and planning out the day, and generally this is the fallback position. But even the best made plans while driving need to be recorded and copied so you can actually carry them out when you get on with your day. Thus, we’re back where we started needing good voice to text.

Has anyone figured out a better solution to this problem? A tool you use that actually works like advertised? Let me know, you could increase my productivity by about 500%.

(The preceding post came to you completely from Siri. Wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Go figure.)