Skip to main content

Dragon Naturally Speaking Tutorial : How to blog faster in Blogger using speech recognition

In this Dragon NaturallySpeaking tutorial, I demonstrate how to use speech recognition with the Blogger platform to write your blog posts faster.

Dragon Naturally Speaking can be used to improve your productivity in any text intensive tasks such as writing or blogging. In the YouTube video below, I show how to write your blog posts faster with Google Blogger. You can utilise  most of the commands shown in the video for your WordPress blog also. For maximum efficiency, you may want to go through the video initially, and then return to this post and review the summary of the commands used in the video to compose the blog post.

Article continues after the ad



Bear in mind that I do not cover each and every functionality available in the Blogger platform. Even demonstrating the most common options took about 21 minutes, which is twice the average time of my video tutorials. However, with a bit of practice, you should be able to start using the other features easily with your voice. Of course, if you face any problems, please describe it in the comments below and I will try to resolve it to the best of my ability. Without much further ado, here is the video.




The video can be divided into 6 segments.

In the first segment, I show how to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to navigate to the Title and the Body parts of the blog. This is done by using the "Click Box" command. This command labels the box control on a webpage. You can then navigate to any of the boxes - including those represented by the Title and Body sections of the blog by just saying out the command "Choose <number>" where <number> is the number of the box controlled labelled by Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

In the second segment, I show how to format the text. Three different approaches are demonstrated. One is by saying the keyboard shortcut corresponding to a particular format action. For example, to underline a text, first select the text and then the keyboard shortcut "Press Control U" which will press the keyboard shortcut "Ctrl + U". You can achieve the same by saying the military alphabet equivalent of the letter that you want to press. For example to press the keyboard shortcut "Ctrl + I", say the command "Press Control India" with India being the military alphabet equivalent of the letter IYou can also format text by saying the command "Click Button" and then choosing the appropriate buttons on the formatting bar by using the command "Choose <number>" as in the first segment.

In the third segment, I show how to insert an link. Just as in the second segment, you have to navigate and click on the link corresponding to this feature on the formatting bar. However, this time, the control is not a button but rather a hyperlink. So you have to say the command "Click Link" and then choose the appropriate hyperlink on the formatting bar. This bring up a dialogue box where you can enter the website address of the link. In this case, I wanted to add the link to this blog. Instead of saying the entire website address, I have written a Dragon Naturally Speaking command. User-defined commands are described elsewhere on this blog. In most circumstances, you will be probably copying and pasting the website address. This can be achieved with the keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting as described in the fifth segment.

Article continues after the ad


In the fourth segment, I show how to insert an image. As in the second segment, you have to navigate and click on the button corresponding to this feature on the formatting bar. A dialogue box is popped up and then you have to select the options by just saying the corresponding text for an option. In this demonstration, I had already images uploaded for the blog earlier. I selected one particular image by positioning the mouse over that. Positioning the mouse is described in this blog post.

In the fifth segment, I show how to embed a YouTube video. This time, the purpose of demonstration, I use is slightly more complicated approach that actually inserts the HTML code. This is achieved by navigating to the HTML code of the blog. Then going to the web page of the YouTube video and getting the HTML code for embedding the video. For cutting and pasting the HTML code, I use the keyboard shortcuts "Ctrl + C" and "Ctrl+V".

In the sixth segment, I show how to use the options available with blog in order to provide meta-information for the blog. This is done by simply saying the options that provides. If there are sub options, you can navigate and select them by simply stating their labels. Or you can use the "Click Button" and "Click Link" to navigate and select as in the earlier cases.

About Dragon NaturallySpeaking:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the most popular speech recognition software on PC. Dragon Dictate / Dragon For Mac is the counterpart of Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Apple Macintosh computers.

Windows:
At the time of writing this blog post, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional Individual 15 is the recommended version for most users. However, I continue to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking premium 13) (approximately $100) because of version 15 incompatibility with Natlink. If your needs are limited to email and web surfing, then you may just want to purchase Dragon naturally speaking home 13 (about $ 50) .

Mac:
Dragon professional for Mac is the recommended version (costs around $ 300) .

You can download the appropriate version directly from the company's web store from the links below. (They usually run discounts once every month  so you can be on the lookout for the deals from the online store and purchase accordingly)



  Dragon for Mac 5




Comments

  1. This is a great article that can be SO helpful to people with Chronic illness. I found you at Fibro Blogger Directory. Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for your encouraging response. If you have not started using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, you can perhaps check out my other posts on using email which is perhaps the best way for a beginner to ease into this. Dragon NaturallySpeaking help me reduce pain while continuing to operate the computer. If we had speech recognition tools earlier, we would have been able to avoid repetitive stress injuries, postural issues and maybe even to some extent chronic illnesses like fibromyalgia. If you need any assistance with using speech recognition, please feel free to contact me and I will do my best to help. Thank you

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chronic pain management with Thermotex infrared heating pad

Thermotex infrared heating pad has been one of my purchases that have helped me a lot in dealing with my chronic pain due to fibromyalgia. Over the course of the past 10 years that I have owned this, I have given it to friends and family to help reduce the pain due to shoulder injury knee and abdominal pain. I have made a YouTube video as a review for this below. I hope you find this useful. The only shortcoming that I have seen is that I cannot wrap it around the shoulder. So if you come across an infrared heating pad which can be wrapped around the neck and shoulders, please do share in the comments below.

Reduce finger, wrist and forearm pain due to computer mouse usage with Gentle Mouse

If you are reading this on a computer screen, chances are that you would have clicked your mouse at least a couple of times to navigate through this content. And in most cases, the finger used to click would be your index finger. Now imagine doing this repetitive movement every few minutes, day after day, year after year and you can easily infer that your fingers are at an increased risk of repetitive stress injury (or RSI) due to mouse overuse. The common name given to this painful condition is  Mouse Finger .  The 'Finger' in Mouse Finger usually leads a person to believe that the pain is restricted to the fingers alone.  However, from what I have surmised after reviewing anecdotal evidence and medical literature, it commonly presents as a cluster of symptoms in the finger, wrist and the forearm. Perhaps that explains why there are no easily available research studies pertaining to Mouse Finger alone. Most of the research studies consider these symptoms as a part of

Chronic pain : Tools of trade

Over the course of several years that I've spent in dealing with chronic pain, I have discovered a number of items that helped to reduce the pain and keep me functional. Here is a list of 10 items that I use frequently : Thermotex infrared heating pad . ( Video review ) I have used this since 2007 and it is still working very well. At the time I bought this, I thought it was pretty expensive. Now that it has been 9 years and the pad really reduced the need of pain medication on several occasions, I think it has paid for the investment several times over . I have mainly used it for abdominal muscular pain. There were times that I have wrapped it around the abdomen and slept at night. The main advantage of infrared is that it penetrates deeper and does not heat up the skin like a conventional heating pad. A good side effect of using it on the abdomen is that it reduces my tendency for constipation . It is also been very useful whenever I had any pathology n the rectum like an