Naturally Speaking..........

This may well be a short post. I'm using a voice recognition programmeme, mainly because I'm suffering from repetitive strain injury and am unable to use my left arm in any repetitive action for their foreseeable future. No crude jokes please! It is so peculiar to sit here and talk at a screen and see my words dancing out without any physical movement from me barring the movement of my lips. Jemser is delighted. For years he has been pleading that my incoherent speech is the reason he fails to carry out those little tasks that lifetime partners tend to ask of each other on a daily basis. Now he thinks that my speech will be controlled by the speed at which the NaturallySpeaking programme can understand me and he will be proved right. Of course, the real reason Jemser doesn't listen (or rather doesn't hear) me is because a)he is an aul fella with waxy ears and b) he’s male!

All coddin’ ‘n jokin’ aside this programmeme is unbelievable. And it cost (including extra RAM) under €100. I'm going to have a lot of fun with this although it does feel like cheating. One of the best things about the programme is its ability to avoid typos and punctuation errors. I do find I'm saying ‘delete it’ a lot but I'm sure as the programme becomes used to my hiberno English and my manic speech patterns we’ll get along fine. Imagine all the shite I can now come out with, my imagination not now limited by the speed at which I can or cannot type! It's a mad, mad, mad world.

I wonder how it will work if I'm writing poetry? I still use a pencil and an unlined notepad when I'm working on a poem, I love the scratching sound and can glide off into another world as the words form themselves. There is something very visceral about poetry, it seems to unearth something within me at a much deeper level than anything else I write, say, or do. Most of my poems are poor and there are very few I show to others. I am often afraid of the emotions they lead me to and so tend to camouflage those feelings with clever quips or flippant phrases. In speaking these last few sentences to my ‘DragonBar’ and seeing them appear as words on a page I feel uneasy; as if something outside of myself has accessed the darker reaches of my mind. I'm sure I’ll get used to it. I have to if I want to continue to write, sparing my body the discomfort of  RSI – but I think I won’t abandon pencil and paper just yet.

There is a man I know the claims eventually we-the human race-will merely have to attend our paid employments for a couple of remote minutes daily, permitting employers access to various areas of our brains, and the rest of the day and night will be ours. Imagine! All those hours to spend with those you love, or alone-whichever one chooses-learning, loving, laughing, being. Telling machines to do the tasks we hate, only spending time doing tasks we enjoy. Utopia. And feck it! I’ll be dead and miss the whole shebang!