How to Tame Dragon Naturally Speaking
Without Losing Your Mind
by Deanna Carlyle
© 2005
This article first appeared in the February 2005 issue of Romance Writers Report.

What follows is one writer's journey into the deepest, darkest lair of voice activated software. Few writers survive the journey, and those who do suffer amnesia and uncontrollable twitching. For the sake of writers everywhere, I have endured these afflictions and more to bring back the ultimate benefit of Dragon Juice, that elixir of increased productivity and hands-free writing.

If you believe that, then do I have a story for you.

The Call to Adventure

Friday, 12:25 p.m.

"It's a brand new imprint," the editor sitting next to me at the banquet table said. We were eating lunch during a big writers conference in Dallas, and the conversation was proving better than the food. "It's called Code Pink and it features kick-ass-backwards heroines on a dangerous mission."

"Excuse me," I asked, and I prayed the creamed spinach I'd just stuffed in my mouth wasn't clinging to my teeth. "Did you say kick-ass-backwards heroines?"

"That's right. Think Femme Nikita meets Austin Powers."

I couldn't believe my luck. At home I had three handwritten chapters of just such a story.

"Oh, my gosh. But that's exactly what I write."

"Can you send it to me?"

"Send it to you?" My tongue turned to rubber and flapped around in my mouth for a while, and something like English came out. Somehow I managed to get to the end of my story pitch, adding, "her name is Blonde, Jane Blonde. And she's a reluctant spy. I'm calling it The Spy Who Snogged Me."

"Send me the first three chapters." She handed me her card. "E-mail is fine."

"I'll get it to you within a week."

My good luck astounded me. I had the groovy editor, I had the groovy character, I had the groovy story. Now all I had to do was type up my groovy pages. This would be a cinch.

I Want My Opposable Thumb!

2:40 p.m.

Two hours later my luck ran out. While on a break from the conference workshops, I donned my swimsuit and dived into the wrong end of the hotel swimming pool (I never said I was smart). I broke nine fingers, one arm and both wrists. That's how important it was to me to protect my face.

Luckily my writing partner had better depth perception and even stronger wrists. As soon as I arrived home from the hospital, I faxed her a copy of my handwritten draft. Unfortunately, however, she couldn't read my writing.

"Have you considered getting professional handwriting analysis?" she asked me over the phone, "I've never seen anything so spiky and cramped. I typed what I could, but it was a lot of guesswork."

With my one good finger I scrolled through the document she had sent me as an e-mail attachment. "What happened to my story? This isn't even my voice. You took out all the jokes."

Silence crackled on the other end of the line.

Uh-oh. I had pressed one of her hot buttons. Just last month we'd had a misunderstanding about how detailed a critique we should give each other. Tessa had the tendency to rewrite whole passages of mine in her own voice, whereas I had the tendency to tell her everything was great and not to change a thing. We were still searching for the golden mean.

"I was trying to help," she said. "I thought it might speed up the process if I took a few creative liberties."

"A few creative liberties? You turned it into a drama."

More hurt silence. "In any case," she said. "It's not ready to go out. You have to develop the story more."

Now it was my turn to do the hurt silence thing.

"I'm sorry," she added, "I meant to say something sooner. It's just, you're doing it again. You're jumping on the bandwagon. You need to pick one genre and stick with it."

A thousand snappy comebacks ricocheted around the inside of my skull. But I held my tongue. Now of all times I needed to concentrate and conserve energy. Granted, Tessa had a point about me jumping on another bandwagon, but she was also envious of my opportunity. I refused to expose my muse to that kind of poison, however unintentional. The only thing to do was to thank her for her help and go the rest of the journey alone.

Already an alternative was brewing in the back of my brain. I would simply buy some speech-recognition software and read my pages into the computer. What a genius plan. Who needed judgmental humans? Dragon Naturally Speaking would take dictation and never pass judgment on me or my writing.

The DH Intervenes

Tuesday, 6:31 p.m.

"Just be careful not to spend too much time fiddling with it," my husband said when the Dragon software arrived the next day. "You know how you are."

Why did everyone have to have an opinion about me? "Of course I won't fiddle too much," I said, grappling with the bulky software box. With my nine broken fingers and my two heavy casts, I could barely open the flap. "I'm going directly into dictation, and after that maybe a little e-mail too. Did you know you can connect your PDA recorder to it and download files for transcription?" I turned over the box and rattled off Dragon's other features. "Plus I can navigate the web and enter data in my Excel spreadsheets. I can't wait to get started."

"And try not to talk to your computer if it does something you don't like," he added, ignoring the barrage of information. "The software might get confused."

I blinked at him. "I never talk to my computer."

My husband looked at the ceiling and said in his native German, "O je, o je."

I Say "Potato", Dragon Says "Pectoral"

Same day, 7:02 p.m.

In the interest of saving time, I set aside the user's manual. I never cared much for user's manuals anyway. They just slow you down. The best way to learn something is to jump in and do it.

In no time I had Dragon installed, the Dragon Pad open, and was ready to dictate from my handwritten pages. The instructions on the quick reference card had said simply to speak naturally into the microphone. All right then. I adjuseted the headset, held the first page of The Spy Who Snogged Me in front of the screen and read aloud at my normal rate. Here's what I said, so you can compare it afterwards:

Here's what Dragon wrote:

My husband poked his head in my office door. "How's it going? Does it work?"

"Everything's fine," I said, waving him away. "I just need to enunciate more clearly."

"Can I see?"

"No! I mean, no." I went to the door, kissed him with all my wifely might and pushed him gently into the hall. Then I bolted the door and raced back to the computer. I had some major work cut out for me.

Repeat After Me: Help!

7:57 p.m.

Oh, you mean you were supposed to train it?

I closed the Help menu with a relieved sigh. No wonder Dragon had garbled my story. I'd forgotten to train it to understand my idiolect. I clicked on "manage users" and followed the prompts: 1) Audio set up? Check. 2) Oral Training? Check. 3) Writing Style Analysis? Check. 4) Acoustic Optimizer? (whatever that was) Check.

My audio training complete, I read the next section of my story into the Dragon Pad, this time enunciating more clearly. Here's what I said:

Here's what Dragon wrote:

Oh dear. How would I ever get my story typed up in time to email it to the editor? I briefly considered dictating my chapters to my husband. But there were two arguments against this idea: 1) He's German, and 2) He's German. Not that I have anything against Germans. I love Germans. I married one. It was just that his English was kinda funky, and he had this thing about correcting my grammar. Plus, he had never read my work. What if he hated it and fell out of love with me?

Not good.

It was time I cracked open the user's manual.

To Err is Human, to Dragon Takes Time

9:24 p.m.

Silly me. No wonder Dragon was still confused. According to the user's manual, when Dragon had conducted an analysis of my writing style, it scanned all the Word documents in "My Documents." Well, as it happened, I was working on my husband's laptop. Poor Dragon had mistaken my husband's German syntax for my English idiolect.

I reinstalled Dragon on my desktop computer and went through the audio training again. At last, thirty minutes later, it was time for Dragon's final test. I opened the Dragon Pad and read:

Dragon wrote:

Yes! It had worked! Well, more or less. Quickly, so as not to lose precious time, I saved the document onto my hard drive as "Spy_Who_Snogged_Me_01," then in a one marathon session I read the rest of my chapters into the Dragon Pad.

Can You Say, ‘Professional Death?'

Wednesday, 5:56 p.m.

But nothing good comes without a price.

The next evening, after five tedious rounds of editing with the help of Dragon's correction feature (I was almost finished!), I took a break to check e-mail. On a lark I decided to see if Dragon would function in my e-mail program.

To my delight it worked. For the next hour I giddily opened, wrote and sent messages, all of it hands free. I was on a mission to empty my in-box in under sixty minutes. With my Dragon headset clamped around my ears, my PDA in one hand, and my Dragon quick reference card in the other, I barked commands at the computer screen like a drill sergeant at his cadets:

"Next message! Previous message! Next unread message! Reply Mail! Reply to all! Forward e-mail! Select that! Attached That! Send now! Send later! Delete e-mail! Print e-mail! New e-mail! Delete that! Delete that! Delete that! Switch to Next Window!"

Whew. I'd done it. In just fifty-six minutes, I'd emptied my in-box. This was cause for celebration. First, however, I would finish up my edits.

But just as I was opening my current document, my computer went "ping." I had mail. It was from a writing buddy, and the subject heading read: Are you OK? I opened the email.

What was she talking about? I never sent her an email or a story. I checked my archives for the original message.

Oh. My. God.

The room grew suddenly cold and fuzzy, and my ears started ringing. I had to prop myself against the nearest wall.

The horrible truth seeped into my consciousness like slow poison in my veins: I'd been so carried away with the speed and responsiveness of Dragon I had accidentally sent the original "Spy_Who_Snogged_Me_01,"-- with the toe-cheese torture scene -- to everyone in my address book!

And what's worse: in the process I had deleted all the latest versions of the same.

I was toast. Everyone who was anyone in women's fiction publishing, including the editor who'd asked for my proposal, had just received a copy of the toe-cheese scene. They would think I was insane. They would boycott me. They would never believe it was an accident. Too much of the basic syntax and story structure were legible. They would steer clear of me at conferences, they would whisper behind my back, they would fall silent when I walked into a room. I would die of tuberculosis in a Paris garret, unknown, unrecognized, unloved.

Dragon? Can you say ‘Professional Death?'

Dictate This

7:35 p.m.

Zero reputation.

Zero credibility.

Zero clue.

As if that weren't enough, the skin under my casts itched, my fingers ached and my temples pounded from the pressure of the Dragon headset. I lay down on the floor, my casts pressed to my closed eyelids.

I should have taken my CP's advice. I should have slowed down and taken more time to develop the story. It was pure hubris to think I could solve all my problems with Dragon Naturally Speaking. I should have contacted the editor, I should have told her about my broken wrists and asked for an extension.

I had to accept the ugly truth: the problem wasn't Dragon Naturally Speaking, the problem was me.

Return with the Dragon Juice

Thursday, 4:46 p.m.

"Ping," my computer said the next afternoon when I finally found the courage to switch it on. "You have mail." Then it went, "Ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping."

You'd better believe I had mail. At least a hundred incoming messages from the sound of it. I could barely get myself to look at the screen. Everybody I'd ever known would be writing to ask if I was all right and was there anything they can do, like call the county mental ward or get me back on my medication.

With my one good finger I opened my in-box and peered at my messages. Yep. Just as I'd suspected. Lots of concerned colleagues, not that I dared to open the files to cofirm it. One of the messages was from Tessa, my CP. Probably writing to gloat. But the subject heading read: Crit of chapters 1-3.

I did a double take. Crit? Had she critiqued the nonsense I'd send her? I opened the document:

I opened the attachment, scrolled down a few pages and caught my breath. Amazing. Tessa had outdone herself. She had corrected every single Dragon mistake in her own words and her own style. The story was now a high-adventure drama better suited to the Bombshell line. But at this point I didn't care. It was polished work.

My eyes felt suddenly hot. I fanned my face and reached for a tissue. This critique must have taken Tessa all night. She was still an invasive perfectionist, no doubt about it, but she was a generous, invasive perfectionist. This was her way of showing she cared.

I got on the horn to Tessa right away. Well, more like, I asked my husband to hold the phone to my ear right away. I thanked Tessa and begged her to be my co-writer for the rest of The Spy Who Snogged Me.

Can You Say Happily Ever After?

Since then Tessa, Dragon and I have teamed up to complete our magnum opus, which Tessa has renamed Strip, She Said. We still haven't heard whether our submission made it beyond the second round of reviews, but that's almost beside the point. Thanks to Dragon Naturally Speaking, we've learned to work with our natural writing strengths and weaknesses, improving both our writing partnership and our efficiency.

Bottom line: Dragon Naturally Speaking takes forever to train (in my book forever is about a week), and even then it's only about ninety percent accurate, at least for me. But it's better than carpal tunnel. Best of all, it can create a love-love relationship with e-mail, with yourself and with your writing partner. Now that's saying a lot.

Two opposable thumbs up for Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Deanna Carlyle writes chick lit mysteries set in Europe. Note: No wrists or arms were harmed in the making of this story. Any resemblance to reality is entirely coincidental.

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