So far, it may seem like voice dictation has turned out to be less useful than it seems, but that’s only when you try to use this technology in real-time. So inevitably, you’ll have to go back and do manual typing no matter how well your initial voice draft came out. Even touch controls work better than formatting by voice. It’s simply faster and more efficient to use tactile controls. Using your voice to format text is practically a no-go from the outset. However, the most reliable method is still explicitly telling the system verbally where to put punctuation or when to, for example, create bold or italicized text. Some of them infer where commas and periods should go and often do a great job. No dictation system has really nailed perfect punctuation and formatting. RELATED: How to Use Voice Dictation on Windows 10 Formatting and Editing Is Still a PainĪ significant amount of writing is simply formatting and editing text. This author has certainly tried, but it doesn’t seems conducive to the writing process, regardless of what you write. The alternative is to adapt how we write to dictation.

With the way current dictation systems work, it’s hard to have this natural writing cadence work smoothly. Then type out a torrent of words once those thoughts are in order. We don’t think out whole paragraphs and sentences on the fly, so speaking the written word is rarely efficient.

The biggest problem with dictating any serious writing is that, unlike reading, writing isn’t a linear process.

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