Hi there folks! Today’s blog entry will be a little bit different. I will be attempting to do this entire blog entry via the voice to text function built in to my tablet.

In theory, this could be a much faster way to do my blog entries than typing them out. After all, while I’m an OK typist, I don’t think I type as fast as I talk. And talking sure sounds a lot better then typing with my big fat fingers on a tiny little virtual keyboard on my 7 inch tablet with its relatively small screen.

At least that’s the theory. So far it’s going okay but I don’t know how to backspace, or capitalize words. And yes , as every single science fiction thing has told us, you have to say your punctuation aloud, which kind of makes me feel like I’m either Victor Borge or Rimmer when he was dictating to the scutters.

Wow. I’m not surprised that it didn’t know Rimmer or scuttersm but it got Victor Borge flawlessly, capitalization and everything, and for that I tip my hat to this new technology.

Anyhow, I know the transition to this new technology will not be perfectly smooth. After all, there’s no technology so perfect that it doesn’t require the human being to adapt to it at least a little bit. So I’m going to have to learn the ways of this particular technology before I can totally consider it a replacement for typing.

But all in all, this works way better than any other voice to text technology that I have ever tries. They’ve been trying to make this kind of thing work for 40 or 50 years that I know about, and only now have they actually got it right. I’m speaking at a totally normal speed and a totally normal tone to this thing.and for the most part it is keeping up with me with a very low error rate.

Not a 0 error rate, but remarkably low considering that this is my first time using the technology for more than a sentence or two just when I was first messing with my tablet here and found out that it had this miraculous new feature. It really gives me that feeling that I am living in the future now, so to speak.

The inability to capitalize words is pretty annoying, I will admit. Also, for some reason, it has to be on the Internet in order for this to work. I think it needs an active internet connection because it does all this through Google Voice.

And that wouldn’t be such a big deal except that the internet access via wifi in my bedroom is still pretty spotty. It cuts in and out about 20 times an hour it seems (okay maybe not quite that much) and I’ve been looking into ways to fix this. I can get something called a repeater for about 40 bucks but that’s basically what we spent on the wifi router in the first place, so part of me kind of resists going in that direction. I mean I could just buy a new router and plug a hard one line into it.

And that’s not totally out of the question, although it will be a last resort.I was really hoping for something way lazier and cheaper than that. You know, one weird trick to make your wifi router work a whole lot better.

Because the thing is, I almost have enough internet in my bedroom. It works just well enough for me to use it but not well enough that it doesn’t do annoying things to get on my nerves 20 or 30 times a day.

It is almost like I am getting the exact amount of WiFi reception in my room to cause the maximum aggravation. any more than this and it wouldn’t bother me that much. Any less and I just wouldn’t bother using the damn thing until I got it working right.

Oh well, it is hardly a world shattering problem. Just a little bit of grating on my nerves that I could do well without. if push comes to shove and there’s no easy way to fix this problem, I will break down and show out the 40 bucks for a router or repeater or whatever is the least amount of money / work.there’s no point in being all annoyed all the time out of sheer stubbornness after all.

But I will at least ask around and find out if there’s any simpler remedy. After all, it almost works well enough.. I only need just a little bit more performance and then it will work well enough in ll parts of my bedroom that it won’t be a big deal.

After all if it only messed up say once a day, it would not be that big a deal. At least that’s how it looks from right now when it’s more like 20 times a day. I might sing a different tune in a few months when I have the wifi in my bedroom working a little better.

Expect a blog entry in the future complaining how once a day this damn thing stops working. How very easily we get used to miracles.

Well, I guess that’s about it for me tonight. This has been an interesting experiment but with the limitations of this particular text to speech engine and my general and my inexperience with dictation, I would have to say that, while I guess this would be easier than using my big fat fingers on the keyboard, it’s still no where near as convenient as just typing the damn thing on my big computer.

Regardless, I am glad I tried this little experiment. It is a very cool technology and now I know its limitations. Perhaps somewhere out there is an app that does it better than the version of text to speech that came bundled with my tablet.

I hereby declare this experiment to be a partial success I have successfully dictated by today’s blog entry via text to speech.

Now I just have to go proof read the damn thing.