Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

A big part of running a blog is spent on consistently writing new content. Writing your articles takes a good deal of time. I’m sure I’m not alone when it comes to using a lot more time  to write than I do for other blog duties. We have to research our content before we even publish it. We have to correct spelling errors and punctuation. And most importantly we have to type the article first.

I’ve just started using voice recognition software, freely available within my installation of Microsoft Word (Windows XP, Vista). All you have to do is get your hands on your Word installation disc that shipped with your pc just in case your computer prompts you to insert this disc. This disc can be an official Microsoft CD or a restore CD from your PC Manufacturer. Open up Word on your computer, click tools, speech, and follow the prompts. I believe everything you need is installed on Vista. You can also go to your control panel to do this, but I think it’s easier to just open Word. Click the following link for instructions on installing speech recognition software through your control panel in Windows XP. To find out if your computer already has a speech recognition engine installed, goto your control panel and click the “speech” applet. When the speech properties box opens look for a tab that says “speech recognition”. If the tab doesn’t exist, no SRE exists yet.

Once you’ve done that, you can begin training the software to recognize your voice. It does not take long for the voice recognition software to recognize your voice and understand what you are saying. As you speak, you will see your words being spelled out in a Microsoft Word document. You can talk faster than you can type, so more content gets written in less time.

The time you save writing your content can be used to proofread your content. We have all written an article once and proofread it twice to check for typos, yet still overlooked some typos. The reason we overlook these typos is because of the time spent writing the article.  After putting an hour into writing an article, we’ll typically only spend the time it takes to read it back twice. We end up skim reading our content and overlooking grammatical errors.

By using voice recognition software to write your content you end up using more, or equal, time proofreading your content. Voice recognition software takes the burden of time away from writing your content. I used voice recognition to write parts of this post just to see if it would work before using it on my other website. You’re reading this, so it worked. I love voice recognition because I’m a slow typist. Often times my thoughts outpace my fingers, making typing an article very time consuming. A huge mistake I make while typing is typing my words out of sequence. I’m dictating my words in my head but my fingers are usually several words behind my thoughts which causes me to ommit entire words. I usually notice the missing words after proofreading, but not always.

Voice recognition saved me in this regard because I’m dictating at the same rate my words come to mind. It’s almost like typing at the speed of thought. No more skipped words in my content and articles. The only setback I can think of is the occasional missing comma. Nothing a little proofreading won’t fix. I really think every blog owner, or writer of any kind, should use voice recognition software. I’m going to buy Dragon Naturally Speaking by Nuance in a couple of weeks. Dragon naturally speaking is probably the most talked about voice recognition software on the market. I had heard of voice recognition almost a decade ago, but never had a reason to use it. This idea couldn’t have come to mind at a better time now that I was spending so much time writing content for my main website.

Speech recognition requirements for Windows XP:

Service pack 2 or better.

Microsoft Speech Recognition Engine.

Application that supports speech recognition (Microsoft Office 2003, and newer or Notepad)

Microphone and Mic input on PC.

That’s it. Give it a try.