Asking the Dragon

 Since I had had a laptop, I had struggled to work Dragon like I used to. And that is bad! If you try to dictate something, and it just doesn't work, then you can either not do your work, or use your hands after all. And you often end up going with the latter. And as a result my RSI was slowly getting worse again. I had tried to get the helpdesk to help me, but they didn't know how to solve this. There was one lady at the helpdesk who knew more, and she would phone me. And after a while she did. But she didn't know how to sort this either. She did have a plan to take things further, though; she suggested I go straight to the helpdesk of the software manufacturer. A good idea, I suppose! So I did.

The bloke I got on the phone was quite on the ball. He talked me straight to the settings I needed to adjust to make sure the audio input would be better. It was really simple! But you needed to know where to find it. And now I could enjoy my increased sound quality, and then find out to what extent this would have solved my problem altogether. Some of it was not audio input! But somehow, on the laptop, Dragon struggled to talk with the software. For instance, on the desktop, I could dictate straight into Outlook and Excel. Since the laptop, I often needed to open a special dictation window; that complicates things. For instance, if you want to insert some text in some pre-existing text, you can't just dictate in between; the dictation box opens, thinks it is starting a new sentence, and won't be closed with a voice command. It requires mouse action.

The Dragon helpdesk has greatly improved how easy it was to dictate, but these other problems were clearly not solved by this. So I needed to continue my mission to sufficient aids to be able to do my work without injuring myself!