We’ve started creating a lot of video tutorials at work, and we thought speech transcription software like MacSpeech Dictate (built on the supposedly phenomenal Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine) would help us prepare scripts.

I gave the software three long samples of my voice, and then imported a collection of lengthy documents it supposedly used to analyze my writing style.  In the end, I even slowed down my speaking to probably around 60 or 70 words per minute – a speed an ordinary typist could probably keep up with just fine, and an advanced typist would find boring.

I tried reading this simple test sentence:

This video is a tutorial for web developers who want to create new applications in our web space, or install applications they’ve downloaded from the web.

This is what came out – I swear I’m not making this up:

This is a program of us look like he’s our lips excreting around each or install outrage at a gallop away.

A coworker swears Dragon is both reliable and accurate, though when he tried to demonstrate that on his own computer he got no better results than I did.  I’m underwhelmed.