Voice. Another way of doing it.

Today's blog post is being brought to you by the power of dragons.

No, not the firebreathing flying kind: the voice activated version.

Although my arm is healing and it's nowhere near as achey as it has been, I'm still conscious that doing too much sets me back. Something as simple as typing an email or a Facebook post can make the back of my hand cramp and leave my elbow feeling stiff.

So Mr Squidge looked at voice recognition software. We were recommended Dragon Naturally Speaking (Nuance) by a friend who uses it with her university work. I picked up the order yesterday, and today have begun training the programme to recognise my voice.

To say that it weird is an understatement. For some reason I can't seem to think as quickly. Normally, my fingers can keep up with what I'm thinking but now, I'm having to stop and think before I say what I want to write, if that makes sense? Perhaps it'll get easier with time, but at the minute I'm still trying to remember the key commands. For example, I've just sent the microphone to sleep to answer a question from Mr Squidge, and tried to turn it on again using the command 'microphone on', and my son had to remind me that the correct command was 'wake up'. And I've just let another lesson; you can't actually ask the machine to type the command because it does that command instead of writing it. Doh!

I've no idea how long it's going to take until I'm not constantly going back over things, but at least my wrist's getting the rest it needs. (Apart from the fact that once loaded into the blog, I have to do any final alteration by hand...as I've just discovered.)

Maybe it'll feel more natural after a bit more practice.