The Writer's Guide to Training Your Dragon: Using Speech Recognition Software to Dictate Your Book and Supercharge Your Writing Workflow (Dictation Mastery for PC and Mac)

by Scott Baker

Your first task is to write a throwaway story off the top of your head. Think of any topic, be it non-fiction or fiction, and just talk to your computer. Better still, close your eyes while you do it and ignore the screen completely.

If you are writing about a character called Araghnya the Destroyer who lives in the Kingdom of Omipotamal, simply call her Jill from the Kingdom of Manchester and use the ‘Find and Replace’ function in your word processor of choice to sweep through your document and make those changes manually later.

Don’t forget - the editing phase is the time when you can add in all of those complex custom words using the Find and Replace function.

"done is better than perfect".

Try to keep your transcription recordings to around a maximum of 20 to 25 minutes. Beyond this, the amount of dictation the program needs to transcribe becomes huge and you'll find your computer is tied up for very long periods of time.