TOPIC: Dragon Speech Recognition

I am sure that this has been discussed, but I was wondering if the Dragon speech program works with the HIP and what the thoughts are about using it.

Works great, quite a few guys use it. Talk to David Andersen, he's one off the top of my head that uses it a lot (just talked to him about it Friday).

Michael, it works just fine in just about any program. The microphone you use is probably the most critical if you're doing on-site dictation.

Using the Dragon notepad out of the program works faster and is more accurate, but you can fill in the blanks in HIP just fine. I think that things slow down a little bit when you are running two very large programs at the same time. It will depend on your computer. I am currently dictating directly into the quick reply box of this website and it is working as fast as I can speak.

The way I use it is to minimize HIP slightly and put a small dragon notepad beside the minimize program.

I go through the reporting program (whether it is the defect panels or photograph captions) and dictate picture by picture (for example). I go through all picture tabs and dictate. I then proofread my narrative document and save it as "inspection notes".

Next I go back to the first photograph tab, highlight the caption paragraph in Dragon Notepad and drag and drop it on the photograph caption box.

Done.

I used this particular method because the caption field under photographs is a single horizontal line and if you have very much dictation, it's difficult to proofread.

Also when you dictate directly into another program with Dragon, the voice computer and dictation commands do not all respond the same. Generally this is not an issue other than capitalization and spacing between words if you are editing a mistake.

I use very few "hunt and peck" defect box selections (other than large paragraphs that explains something that is relative to the same type of defect in every instance).

Just leaving a small dragon notepad open, you can drag-and-drop into just about anything.

I would be going back to my office to dictate. I think I do my report the same as you. I go through and place my pictures in the appropriate section and then do the report as I go through the pictures. Do you do on-site dictation? Any suggestions on a microphone?

The big question?????  Does it save you time? How long did it take you to do the reports by typing versus using Dragon?

David, I sent you 2 emails. You can disregard.

I just got dragon version 11. Not sure when I will get to using it, but I will let you guys know how it goes. I sure hope it saves me time.

I began using Dragon 11 a few months ago thanks to a post by David discussing it. I actually do have most of my comments peppered with drop down lists but I use Dragon in combination with the lists. Most of my comments can be built and customized using just the lists but about 30-40% of my comments need to be more specific to a unique issue. I use Dragon to insert detailed phrases in my existing comments and to write those unique comments from scratch. I couldn't tell you which is faster because I don't know that any one method beats all the others if used by every inspector. Try using it either whole hog or just adding bits at a time and you'll find what you like in under a week.

I suppose Dragon has made me faster, but I haven't noticed. If I were making the same comments as when I just typed them in, it would definitely be faster. But the voice recognition allows me to say more in the same or shorter time and I take advantage of that. My reports are better but not all that faster. It also eliminates most if not all of the switching back and forth between mouse and keyboard which was an extreme annoyance to me.

Oh and one final note, it definitely saves time when captioning photos no matter what method you use.