Dictating on the iPad 3

I have tried dictation in the past, but have not found it satisfactory for writing books or other important documents. It seems to me that different areas of the brain are needed to produce text by hand or by dictation for writing efforts. So having found writing by hand much better for me, that is what I have done up to now.

However, now the iPad 3 has a wonderful feature that allows you to dictate into any document you are working in that would ordinarily accept written text. This feature is part of Siri, the voice-activated command center in the iPad and iPhone.

In this past year, I upgraded to an iPad 3. Oh joy! I could now dictate. Then came the stumper: How? For instance, what do I say when I want to start a new line of text? Or, what do I say when I want the next word capitalized?

I turned to Google for help. The help I found was only partial. Many sites showed me how to use the microphone in the keyboard on the iPad 3. This turns dictation on and off. However, my question of what to say to get what I wanted remained unanswered.

The Sermon on the Mount was right:

Ask, and it will be given you.  Seek, and you will find.

Today, after asking and seeking again, I found the information I wanted. The guide on what to say while dictating, to get the results you want, are found by going to "More Fun with Siri Dictation."

Will this make me more prolific? This I do not know. However, I am willing to give it a try to see if I can get my forgiveness book back on track. Right now I am very delinquent in making frequent entries in that draft.

If you have a handheld device that will accept dictation, I hope this information will help you as much as I think it will help me. And -- in case you are wondering -- I did dictate quite a bit of this post.

To sign off, I leave you with this delightful snippet. The other day I had lunch with a friend who told me that she found an old draft of a book she had worked on some time ago. She wanted to get the book into a current Word document, so she read the text and dictated the old draft into her iPhone 5.

That effort worked fine for getting the old hand-written draft into a text document on her computer. However, my friend then experienced an interesting side effect. That night, while reading a story to her grandson, she realized she was reading all the punctuation out loud.

Can you imagine? The small child snuggles up to grandma on the couch and then listens to:

"Piglet, exclamation mark," said Christopher Robin, period, capital, "What are you doing, question mark." And so on.

Oh well, happy dictating.

See the original article Dictating on the iPad 3
                                       in  Strokedaze

SSTattler:   If you have a computer, iMac or PC(Microsoft), get Dragon for Mac Speech Recognition for the Mac or Dragon NaturallySpeaking Speech Recognition for PC (from Nuance).  It does the same as Siri but it works either iMac and PC.