Taming the Dragon May Provide Solace/ Remedie for Wary Writers Paws After CampNaNoWriMo

This morning I woke up with my hands stiff. Half asleep I noticed how painful it was to make a fist. This is what always seems to happen by the end of a NaNoWriMo run. Camp NaNo Day 28, and I have 5,799 words to go. Minus the 433 I wrote this morning before breakfast.
 
That pain in my hands is worrisome, and while dozing (off), I started thinking of the Dragon speech recognition program. Years ago, I played with the trial version, and discovered the program had a problem with my accent. However, the Dragon can be tamed, or at least trained to recognize the particularities of my tongue. Still, the learning curve is what I fear, for Dragon as well as myself. I dream on, about dictating interesting parts from my journals, now wouldn't that be convenient?

After my first cup of jasmine green tea, I tried the Dragon App on my iPhone, speaking Dutch. Not bad, although some words went missing, and the App clearly is made for short runs, for more wordy dictation Dragon Dictate for Mac must be the way to go. Then I changed the language back to American English. Surprise, surprise, in the years since my first encounter with the Dragon my pronunciation has become more recognizable.

Dragon's misinterpretation of certain words is understandable and funny. See below. NaNoWriMo becomes nano rhino, and iPhone becomes Twitter. This could be an unexpected and useful extra for  ESL speakers to check on their pronunciation.  That my "dozing" is spelled with an "s" reminds me of the father of a friend up north in the Netherlands who claimed he could hear I was from Amsterdam, because of the way my zees sounded like esses. Which I could not imagine to be true. There was no way on earth my parents would have let me get away with that.
No "We gaan naar Sandvoort aan de See," where it should be "Zandvoort aan de zee" in our home!

This morning I woke up with my hands stiff half-asleep I noticed how painful it was to make a fist this is what always seems to happen by the end of the nano rhino run camps nano date 28 and I have 5799 words to go minus the 433 I wrote this morning before breakfast that pain in my hands is worrisome and while dosing I start thinking off to Dragon speech recognition prep program I play Twitter trial version and discovered the program had a problem with my accent however the Dragon can be changed or at least trained to recognize the particularities of my tongue still the learning curve is what I fear for Dragon as well as myself I dream

Dragon does well by me. Still, I'm not confident enough about my tongue to connect the Dragon App with Facebook and Twitter, imagine the trouble I could get into ...
Meanwhile, the old paws have unfurled, while writing this post, there's hope, with or without Dragon.


This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.