I gave a virtual talk at the always excellent AccessU conference late last month. I don’t use a computer keyboard to control a computer – instead I use a mix of speech input and a Wacom pen tablet. Despite its annoyances, using speech to control a computer can be done well, and the talk was about the state of speech input and how I use it on a computer and smart phone.

I gave several real-time demos as part of the talk, but I also made videos of the demos. After the talk I added the recordings to the slides and captioned them.

To sum things up, speech is a useful input method, but almost 30 years after it was first introduced on the PC it’s not yet up to its full potential on a computer or a smart phone. It’s not as efficient as it could be. I have several asks for the keepers of Dragon and also Apple. Dragon has gone through several owners in the last couple of decades and was acquired by Microsoft in April.

Near the end of the talk I gave a brief demo of my latest project, Short Text, which is a different thing altogether. It’s a shorthand that makes both keyboard input and handwriting more efficient than the classic way to use a keyboard or to handwrite text, because you don’t have to spell words all the way out.

For the details you can take a look at the slides, including demos:
Making Input Efficient: Speech and Short Text
AccessU, May 19, 2021

I’ve also updated my Short Text Project page. I’m looking for folks who want to try out Short Text and give me feedback. Give me a shout if you’re interested.