Machine gun is a very powerful, very dreadful, very scary weapon in battlefield. Yet, when I am invited to chat online, the first sentence I send back in the conversation is usually "a second please, let me get my machine gun..." and my friend on the other side knows what it is; and I can imagine he is warming up himself in front of the computer rubbing his two hands vigorously, staring into the monitor at the chat dialogue box, awaiting to confront with the challenge from my machine gun.
It is my dictation software -- a computer program which turns your speech into text when you speak into a microphone. Once you have trained this program well, it will recognize your voice, take your dictation and type the text out accurately. It is very helpful to people with difficulty in typing. because its speed is three times faster than the average typist, so I nicknamed it "the scary machine gun".
To tell you the story of the machine gun, its background should start from my early teens period .
Starting from late 1960s, children of my generation found that they began to have some pocket money from their parents due that Taiwan economy was taking off. Gradually we were able to expand our after school activities, from just doing extra school study in the classroom or playing basketball in the sport field which are of money saving in nature, to the money spending ones such as having a yummy snack at the canteen or going to the theater to watch a movie which is the most popular option among the school children.
I was a movie lover too during my second and third years in the junior high school. The admission was as little as two bucks, about ten cents of New Zealand dollar today. Most of the movies were from America, so we had learned quite a lot of American cultures through watching movies. Besides all those cowboy stories, the ones that I had the most profound memories were "sayonara", "travelling the world in 80 days". And I don't know why, every time when the movies played the part of which an office clerk was typing really fast following the dictation from his boss, I naturally endow him with lots of admiration. I think that was how I was later motivated to learn typing skill and became the fastest typist in my class in the college.
I believe that I would rather be that wealthy boss giving the dictation, than being that secretary typing his tail off, when I was absorbed in the episode of the movie. However, after I had grown up and entered the work force, I was neither a boss nor a secretary but only a guy pretty capable of typing with high competence in both speed and accuracy in the company.
Whether it is pre-destined or just from my own choice, that in my 15 working years in Taiwan before 1991, all the jobs I were in, required me to be working with typewriter to more or less a degree. I hope you don't say it was just a coincidence. After all I was just a young guy living in a non-English speaking country, am not I?
In 1992, I immigrated to New Zealand. After two years of acclimation in the new land, I could not but yielded my aspiration of starting a business to the harsh reality and chose to work for a stationery wholesaler. My main role there was "office assistant", and here the coincidence fell upon me again, I was required by the job to type various kind of document almost everyday more or less.
Perhaps because of the vivid memory about the episode of people sitting by the typewriter in the office typing mindfully and rapidly like a hen pecking grains from the ground, every time when I type, that mind picture always flashed through my mind, and made my typing more enjoyable to me, and feeling like I was the smart and confident typist in the movie. So I have been enjoying typing since I had acquired the skill at the age of 20.
In year 2005, I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. The main symptoms of this disease are rigidity, tremor and the slowness in movement. Gradually many tasks that normal people can do easily are becoming more and more difficult for me, and typing is one of them. By early 2010, the symptoms were worsening to this stage where I needed assistance from tools, for instance, brushing teeth, I needed an electric brush to do the business. My typing ability was crippled even under medication, and was generally very slow. Sometimes during the tail part of the medication period, especially early in the morning, the hands were just like being frozen and suspended above the keyboard trembling and could not do a single thing.
In an e-mail sent to Robbie in January 2010, I mentioned about why I was writing him far less e-mails then before, and what had caused the problem -- my Parkinson's disease.He immediately sent me an e-mail briefly asking me to Google "naturally speaking" for more details about the dictation software he would recommend me to adopt to tackle my typing difficulties.
Naturally speaking? I've never heard of this before. And from the Google search, I realized that "Dragon naturally speaking" was what Robbie meant to say, and was the brand name of a widely used dictation software. With this program installed in the computer, the user speaks into a microphone and the computer turns the signals from the wave into text on the screen. That was indeed something I needed and was affordable to me, only $179 for the standard version.
After a few days contemplation in making up my mind, I decided to buy through Trademe hoping the price offered there would be more affordable. It turned out to be true, you could start your bid from $99, or got it straight away by paying a "buy now" price of $129. I chose the latter.
It was February 12 of 2010, I was half way in my morning practice when the parcel was delivered to my doorstep. Without any delay I unpacked it, read the installation instructions, and began the process of installation followed by some training which required me to read aloud some text document about 15 minutes long into the microphone to make the software recogniz the way I speak. Within about one hour, all these were done.
it was time to actually try it out. I was excited and nervous, just like a small boy was nervously practicing riding his new bike, not sure what might turn up.
I started with the most used phrases -- "how are you?"... "haven't seen you for long time." How amazing it was, my words were turned into text on the screen almost instantly after I finished the phrases. I extolled the the inventor smart; I thanked Robbie's shrewd recommendation; I said to myself that I had got a loyal typing assistant virtually.
The frustration grew up to a point which nearly made me pick up the phone to ask them for a refund and totally give up the hope of reaping the benefit from this software.
It began to show its cooperation by typing out more accurate words on the fourth day of its arrival, and that higher accuracy grew steadily every day but very slowly and was still far from my satisfaction. I had been very patient in dealing with this semi-auto machine gun until two months after its purchase when Nuance released an update for this software.
I did not put any hope on this update because I almost had enough with its semi-auto nature. However I just underwent the download and installation of that update. After the process was done; and after I had injected about 30 minutes of training into the freshly updated version, I tried it by writing an e-mail. Alas! The improvement was dramatic -- the accuracy soared to a level totally beyond my expectation. And since then, I happily nicknamed it "the machine gun".
With this weapon at hand, I replied almost every single e-mail, even those only carrying a forwarding and without a message, with not just a couple of sentences, but with three or four paragraphs of message. At the beginning, all the forwarding senders politely replied saying that they welcomed my e-mails generated by the dictation software. By and by, I found that some of the forwarding senders shunned away. apparently my sudden change into being a talkative e-mail writer had scared many of them away. So I re-nicknamed my dictation software as "the scary machine gun".
That's the story of how the originally brand named as "Dragon naturally speaking" was nicknamed as "the scary machine gun" by me.
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