Transcribers don't yet exist, not in the form I need. But I have an idea of how they could function. Thanks to a lot of people working on this kind of thing, I think it will one day come to life.
A transcriber, as I see it, would convert my messy spoken English into highly functional written English, error-free, translating my colloquialisms in real time. It would generate text wherever I tell it to, and where possible, the transcriber could also leave an annotated audio recording of my original voice. Maybe the audio recording could be embedded in a printed page just underneath the text. Wave a wand at a sentence and my voice would start playing.
That, to me, is the next big Killer App. When transcription is sufficiently error-free and cheap, typing will hardly be necessary for many people. Developers would still need keyboards, because a lot of what we do is tied into keyboard shortcutting. I can write a for loop with a keyboard much more quickly than I could speak it. But, if I had to write a big long paper in English for other people to read, that's where the transcriber would shine.
February 15 2007, 07:37:12 UTC 5 years ago
February 15 2007, 09:47:41 UTC 5 years ago
RSI
I feel really badly for all the people I know who have RSI. Back in Boston, my officemate had to write whitepapers all the time, but RSI nearly immobilized him. He tried every last remedy on earth to try to make the RSI better. Eventually he settled on herbs and laser acupuncture.My inherent laziness has helped me avoid RSI, insofar as I take regular breaks from typing. My work style is fairly nonlinear, thinking + feeling, whole brain stuff, so circling around is something I do constantly.
I'm working on a job this week that requires me to create and edit a lot of code, and worries about RSI are never far from my meager consciousness.
February 15 2007, 18:03:58 UTC 5 years ago