As he crosses Wyoming, bMighty's "Tech On The Go" correspondent considers how voice recognition keeps him productive while he's on the move and behind the wheel
Our "Tech On the Go" correspondent Scott Koegler will be filing his column from the road this summer as he crosses the country with his family over the next six weeks. Though there's bound to be some "vacationing" along the way, Scott will continue to operate his small business from the road. Throughout this adventure, he'll share tips, tricks, and insights about how to keep a business running smoothly when you're on the move while maintaining a virtual connection to his office network, server, desktop computer, and video surveillance system.
Scott and his wife, Donna Marie, are traveling in a Ford E-350 van, pulling a travel trailer, accompanied by their dogs Cody and Mac. They left their home in Wilkesboro, N.C., on June 16 bound for the Rocky Mountains. After crossing the Continental Divide, they'll stop off in Las Vegas, peek into the Grand Canyon, and visit family in New Mexico before heading for home along Route 66 (and more modern byways).
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You can follow Scott's progress on
Casper, Wyo. -- The first leg of our trip is nearly done today. That's just the 'getting there' part. We are in Casper for the night, and will move on tomorrow, to Grand Teton National Park for three days, followed by Yellowstone National Park for a week. One of the issues I'm dealing with is the time it takes to do my writing. I have plenty of time to think about what I want to write, and have no problem doing that while I'm driving. However, turning my thoughts into text is another matter altogether. But I have a couple of helpers.
I categorize my text into two types; essays and tweets. Actually, the 'tweet' category, that references the short, Twitter entries that max out at 140 characters, is a misnomer but is to the point. For the tweets, I have been using Jott Networks service that converts my phoned-in voice message to text, then passes it to any of a variety of Web sites as text. There is a good variety of destination sites that can receive and hold your text, or you can simply leave the Jott notes in Jott folders, and use them as to-do lists, or reminders of thoughts.
The process is simple. Just sign up for a free account, then dial the Jott phone number (866) JOTT 123 and talk your message up to 30 seconds. The service allows you to select multiple destinations for your texts, and to save them to multiple lists within Jott itself. I use the service to send tweets to my Twitter account, as well as save reminders and notes about what I need to write about later.
Jott's services are free ... another reason to try them out. The ability to talk your messages to a cell phone while commuting, and have them transcribed, is a great way to get your thoughts recorded and avoid traffic accidents.
The second product I'm using is Dragon Naturally Speaking. DNS is a highly evolved speech-to-text software that really does do the job as advertised. I use it while at my desk and at my laptop, but more important for my drive time composition, is the ability to record to a digital voice recorder. For that, I use an Olympus WS-331M. This recorder has 2 GB of memory, and can hold many hours of voice. It then plugs directly into my laptop's USB connector, where DNS can access the files and translate them to text.
To start out, I read some predefined text into my recorder, then had it converted. After the initial training session the recognition accuracy was above 95%, leaving me to edit and otherwise revise my composition.
The main point of using the digital recorder and DNS combination is that I can get a substantial amount of my note taking, Twittering, and writing done during the five to seven hours of driving I've been doing. Even better, it leaves me time in the evenings to do things other than work, which is actually the main point of taking this trip.
See you on the road!
See more "Tech on the Go" columns by Scott Koegler
