Using a dictation program

With my recent review of "Kingfisher Days", I discovered once again the perils of dictating to a computer. The dictation program requires relative silence to interpret speech and convert it to text. Unfortunately, when I was dictating the review, two of my grandchildren ( seven and three) were entertaining (read: "running and shouting enthusiastically with")two friends (six and two) in the room next door.

This state of affairs had the effect of confusing the poor program (Dragon Naturally Speaking) and produced some wonderful expressions that a spell checker will not pick up and even cursory proofreading misses: " . . . very few of the negatives of the college experience . . . " should be " . . . very few of the negatives of the cottage experience . . . " and " . . . the narrator was an adult would like experience . . . " should be " . . . the narrator was an adult with life experience . . . "

This situation must have confused my readers until Flora drew my attention to it. I would have corrected it earlier, but at the time, the seven year old was playing a wizard game on-line, and I did not want to disturb him, even though he is very polite and instantly lets me back at the keyboard if I request it.

There is an interesting corollary: the ability of DNS to give me homonyms has given me some interesting lines in the occasional poem that I have dictated, thereby suggesting a whole new art-form: poetry by a hard-of-hearing speech to text program. I have commented on this before, and have posted one or two such works, with advisories, of course.