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.
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 I. You 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.
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 is the counterpart of Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Apple Macintosh computers.
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 because of its incompatibility with Natlink. You can download Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional Individual 15 here.
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