I consider learning touchtyping colemak to be able to type english texts much faster then currently using no touchtyping qwerty.
However with the new dictation feature offered by IOS5 and soon Mountain Lion, I wonder if this still a wise thing to invest my time in?
Wow many words per minute can you achieve with dictation VS colemak?
Are these 2 ways of entering text complementary(next to each other) or supplementary(in stead of)?
I haven't had any good luck and good experience with the dictation as I have always found myself to go with the typing option as I am more used to going that way, actually. But in most cases that you are going to be more apt and used to dictation, it surely will be working really great, as long as you keep everything and all pronunciations working really well.
As a court reporter I use a combination of speech recognition (Dragon Naturally Speaking 11.1) and my home-brewed stenotype shorthand with WordPerfect for Windows and a Maltron dual hand 3D keyboard. My first version of Dragon was 3.0, and it's steadily improved since then.
It's easy (in fact almost essential) to use the two systems in a complementary fashion. I don't type much from written sources, but using practice pages from an old typing manual I've achieved over 210 wpm with the Dragon at an accuracy of about 98%. One of the necessities of using the Dragon is that there must be a pause before speaking a command to the computer. The pause is user-adjustable but it cannot be too short or it could result in the computer misunderstanding what is said, and executing a command instead of recognising as text. Thus I've found in a situation where there are likely to be a few commands (particularly telling the computer to "press" a certain key) intermixed with text recognition, it is actually more time efficient to use the keyboard directly rather than the speech-recognition.
Whilst it may sound easy, (as mentioned above) using a speech recognition package is actually a fairly technically taxing undertaking, and doing it incorrectly is likely to result degradation of the system's performance over time.
Joe
