In my last blog entry I spoke about how useful it can be to have a written version of your speech but there are a lot of people out there who hate writing things down or typing on computers, they feel that it’s restrictive or tedious, so writing a speech would be a burden for them and possibly stop them from producing the best speech possible.
I have a simple solution – use a speech recognition tool. It will do the writing for you, all you have to do is talk.
There are a number of them out there but for most of us a very effective one is already on your computer. The Windows speech recognition tool works very well.
It isn’t perfect but it gets better the more you use it and you can train it to understand your pronunciation and dialect. It will still make mistakes but it will be much quicker than having to type the whole text in yourself.
There are two extra advantages:
1. You can speak your ideas as they come to you so what your record is more natural spoken language, not written language
2. It improves your diction. The clearer you speak, the better the computer will understand you so that when you stand up to give the speech, the better the audience will understand you.
Give it a try. Speak, don’t write.