I have had the opportunity to play around with Dragon NaturallySpeaking software and I am trying it out for the first time right now with this very text. I have taken the tutorial, which took about 15 minutes to get the basics down and learn a little about how to use some of the features and tools that they have in the program. It’s cool because they have more editing than I expected; selecting words, using undo, adding capitals and punctuation is all very simple to do. For example, it was rather easy for me to italicize simple to do and the last sentence. I did have a little trouble with it because when I was finished, my cursor was in front of the punctuation mark that we use the end of a sentence which I can’t currently use because when I say. It shows a. I hope you get the gist.

For this paragraphs I’m not going to make any corrections verbally or not I haven’t typed anything us thus far but I have made some verbal correction based on the things I learned in the 15 minute tutorial to serve unfair for the Dragon NaturallySpeaking people to say that he went there program is bad because it doesn’t pick up exactly once and because it is quite easy to undo so if I wanted to change the word serves to sort of above or delete the word he in the Indo sentence people to say that he went there were hacked the word into whatever that is in the last sentence I could relatively easily just by saying the command selects into (() as you can see I’ve had a little trouble with this particular paragraph however as I said it’s relatively easy to make edits in such. It’s also relatively easy to insert bold, Caps, and other formatting.

All in all the most difficult thing for me so far is remembering to speak punctuation. Supposedly there is an autopunctuation feature, but haven’t seen anything to suggest that it is actually working now.

I’m going to continue to play around this program and I promise that I will keep you posted as I do so. Rock on.

How have we not come up with a better way to build vending machines than with those stupid coil things? Have we all not lost our money only to watch our desired snack selection hanging by an edge and out of grasping distance? With all the technology in this world we can’t come up with something better?

Yahoo! news has just (I think) added a new feature on some of their news articles that allows for an AJAX search lookup of some terms within the article.

It is a neat idea, although often much of the results overlay “window” appears below the fold of the page, especially if the link is towards the bottom. If they could somehow sense that and move the window accordingly, that would be nice.

It also makes more sense in some situations than others. In the great article I was reading, for example, it made sense for the linked text “Britney Spears” to bring up pages related to her. On the other hand, when I saw the text “The Smoking Gun” linked, I expected to be taken to that site.

Interestingly, when I saw this a few days ago, the icon next to the name was a downward arrow. Since then, they have replaced that with a magnifying glass icon, which conveys the “search” theme a bit better.

[Yahoo! News]: Britney and the Saga of the Bald Billboard