Speech to Text… Take Three

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Eric

I grabbed a new tool. I set it up and tested it out on the drive home. I thought about just posting the raw words, but it’s a rambling mess. What I did get though, was around 1,800 words of raw, rambling mess – so this looks like it might help me keep moving posts like this forward more efficiently. There will be some edit needs, but this might actually work this time.

So here we go for test number three! I tried out a different app yesterday, rambled on mercilessly for probably 15 or 20 minutes. When I went back to look at the text from that particular app – it had stopped recording as soon as the screen shut off. That rambling mess – almost all of it went away. I hope to get the little piece of that posted in the near future. That’s the point of this. I want to be able to put together some thoughts in a more timely manner get things out for blog posts. Move things forward. There are a lot of times when the moment I sit down and I think to myself, “Okay, here it is. I’m going to… I’m going to write!” and I end up knocking out a blog post when what I should be doing is working on one of my stories.

That was as far as I got before this thing errored out.

I think that’s going to be a big problem. I’m trying to do this while I’m driving. It allows me to use the drive time usefully.

This thing has errored out like twice while I’m driving and that’s really sort of the point. It needs to be working while I’m driving. I need to not pay attention to the app and focus on driving. That is the primary thing I should be doing. The app should allow me to use my drive time in a more productive manner.

I mentioned the drive time to a friend at a convention recently and he suggested it. He suggested a different app, but that different app uses AI. I don’t know if this one uses AI or not cuz maybe it doesn’t. I will check it out. I am not a fan of using AI. I had a whole rambling thing about AI yesterday and I hope that this one doesn’t go away. If I see the error message pop up out of the corner of my eye I’ll just stop and then we’ll come back to it later. Until then I’ll just keep going.

So – drive time. I want to use this drive time productively. I want to use it for getting thoughts out. Stuff that I can use for quick edits to send into a blog post. If I can get the blog post put together quickly, that saves me time. I do want blogging to be a thing that I continue to do. I do want to continue. I’ve done it for years, but have fallen off a lot after recent events. I’ll start working on stuff and fall off because time, then I’ll start working on stuff again. I put forth a lot of effort in just starting and stopping. I’m throwing opinions out there and keeping the ‘publicity’ going, but what I should be doing is writing more of my stories. I need to get my work out there, so we’re going to start with the blog post and see if I can move forward faster.

Moving to the stories as far as using this speech to text thing won’t be as easy. The first thing that I noticed after yesterday’s attempt is that speaking for number of minutes continuously not an easy thing. Particularly if it’s on scripted. I was all over the place. I was throwing thoughts at this thing yesterday from all over. I should probably be thankful most of it was lost, but even today I can tell already – this is going to be super stream of consciousness.

I don’t know, or I haven’t quite figured that part out yet. The most important thing is to make sure it works first. I will just chatter on as I’m on my drive home and we’ll see when we come up. The app says ‘unlimited length’ for posts and I’ll put it to the test.

Another part is I want to be traveling with purpose. So many topics have slid past just based on my ability to get to the computer and type. I want what I have to say to have some kind of meaning as well. I say that because I’ve discovered that I’m still very upset about something that happened (many years ago) with a local news source. I went on a rant yesterday about this and I got caught up calling it a newspaper and describing a blog in column inches… it wasn’t great. The incident was that this news source had a columnist that they paid – yes, an actual live human – and actual live human was in a columnist position getting paid and you are potentially blocking somebody else out of that position doing actual work. What bothered me? This individual went on at length saying, “well… I’ve got nothing.”

I was angry then and I’m still annoyed now. IF you don’t have anything to say anymore, get out of the way! That person got paid! It just… it bothered me. I saw a story recently that said she was still that person until she recently retired. I shouldn’t be so upset about it. I suppose that’s pretty much any channel these days. If you turn on any media source there are a whole lot of people with nothing to say.

Having this time should help me add words.I did some rough math in my head. Even if I’m only throwing down… keep it to round numbers here… I manage a thousand words three times per week when I’m driving back from the office. That’s 3,000 words that I didn’t have before. 3,000 words a week for a month, there’s another 12,000. Hopefully keeping things moving. Trying to do the math in my head that’s like 72,000 words or so in half a year. A pretty good chunk of a novel right there. With edits and formatting, I think I could put together a book in a year. That’s if it’s only the words that I use while I’m using the speech to text. That sort of thing is a huge boost, so fingers crossed.

Doing this will mean, vocal chords warming up. It takes effort, it takes time, and if I’m going to do anything with a story I can’t just off the cuff throw Story Stuff down like this and have it be successful. Side note – talking about hundreds or thousands of words is great, but that’s if they’re good words. There’s no guarantee that the words will be worthwhile at all. There’s the very real chance that it’ll be half that amount just because most of it, the majority of it is simply garbage. I’ll be interested to see how that was typed. I pronounced garbage with a bit of an accent. A person who’s speaking doesn’t always translate directly to text. What you’re saying, the emphasis, the hesitations… those sorts of things don’t automatically come through.

I have always struggled with moving a story told to the written word. I think that’s part of the explanation of why my writing is so slow. If I’m talking to somebody and we’re having a conversation and I have emphasis and I have sound effects and accent and I can tell a really good story. That doesn’t always translate directly to text. While I may be a decent storyteller that doesn’t make me a good writer. It’s a really hard thing to translate from one to the other.

So I’m testing out my stream of Consciousness here to see how it looks, how it works. I’m certain that I repeated myself probably three or four times within the context of the last 10 or 15 minutes but that’s the other piece of this. When you don’t have a plan, when you don’t have an outline, when you don’t have a goal in mind, then you just go you ramble and sometimes you get repetitive and sometimes end up with the similar word creeping into your text over and over and over again. I might need to find and replace, or just a word search in general to find that word that you’ve used again and again and amusingly enough again should probably be one of those words.

Having said all of that before this, I do intend to research whether or not this tool uses AI. Part of that is I am not a fan of AI. My background in science fiction has shown AI as the bad guy so much, for so long, it’s difficult to escape from that mindset for me. I have a minimal understanding of large language model training and that sort of thing. It’s certainly not enough to say I understand it. All I could really say is that I’m vaguely conversational about it. It’s emotional for me. It’s the feeling portion of it I’m not comfortable with. If I don’t feel comfortable with it then I’m not going to want to use it. There’s also a part of me that wants to do the background research because all of the news lately shows the amount of resources that AI is consuming in terms of power and computer chips and water resources. All of that sort of thing along with the massive number of data centers that are being put forward in planning processes right now… that feels like the sort of thing that could very easily get out of hand. Far too easy using it and not being aware of how it’s going to affect our environment.

For my purposes, tools that I have seen so far that companies have put forward for AI do a lot of things very poorly, very quickly. I can get you a lot of wrong answers in a heartbeat. If we are going to depend on them then we definitely want to make sure that we are prepared. Correct answers for things that we want to be able to have a level of confidence in. When we say “AI did this and I’m pretty sure it’s correct” it’s not always enough. I don’t want to say “hey AI did this and I never checked it out” and then find out at some point later it absolutely didn’t work, was wrong, and now the stuff that I’m working with is wrong and that, that really bothers me. Do I think AI is going away? Absolutely not. There are too many companies that have invested too much money. They’re putting AI in places that it absolutely does not belong. Eventually the market will find an appropriate level and straighten itself out. When we know the appropriate tools, the appropriate use cases of those tools, then we can deal with it. It does NOT need to be in everything. In fact it bothers me that it has been forced into my email account already. I don’t want it there. I don’t need it there. I don’t need some computer telling me ‘hey I can help you write that better’. No, you really can’t. You’re going to use generic terminology that doesn’t fit my voice. My stories, my voice. That matters. Not enough people get that.

There it is. My massive, rambly, on my way home piece. I am now actually within probably 5 or 10 minutes of the house and I have just let all of this go~

And it errored out again. A fine point to wrap up at.

Far more editing time than I wanted (close to an hour). More words than I thought (final count just over 1,900). A successful test. More rambly words to follow!

Speech to Text – Take Two

Posted on June 15, 2026 by Eric

Just imagine the little movie clapper thing making that snapping sound… because imagination is about as far as I got. Here’s the text:

As I am on the road home for testing this out for the first time and I have no idea well I have no idea number one how long I’ll be able to just speak at this thing number two I have no idea what exactly I’m going to speak about just trying to test it for the sake of testing it and number three I suck an indexing and I didn’t have a third thing so now comes the real test because the screen is about to shut off and I’m not sure where exactly the whole thing ends or starts or how long a pause I can have if I don’t have a actually stop doing this see if it actually picked up all these words that’s it for now post the results of this test up to my blog and then we’ll try it again later

That is the rambling result of more than twenty minutes of talking. Turns out the mic shuts off if the screen goes off in that app. I have to consider that a complete fail. I have no use for a tool meant to keep my hands free if I have to keep paying attention to it and poking it every couple of seconds. It didn’t keep up well with my speaking pace, nor did it catch everything.

I’ll look up and try another one here over the next day or so. This one is getting uninstalled.

Tool Testing

Posted on June 14, 2026 by Eric

I recently changed firms at my day job. The new place is a much further drive than I have had in some time.

I was talking with a friend about my current place of employment that I when I have to go to the office, I need to drive more than I have in a long time. It seems to be a real waste of time. To have this 45 minute period each way that I can’t really do anything with is wasteful. To be fair, I have listened to more news and more music, but there are days when I need more time and that seemed like a usable spot. He suggested that what I needed was a way to talk to notes – use a voice to text transcription tool of some sort. I could use that time driving productively by taking notes from my train of thought, then quickly editing the notes so that I could keep my stories and my blog moving along at a better pace.

Even if I only got a few hundred words, that would be a few hundred more than I had before.

This is not the fist time I’ve tried a tool like this – but this is the first time I’ve had specific time when I couldn’t do other things, or type at all. This was my first attempt with an app called Voice Notebook.

As with any voice to text app I’ve encountered in the past, the editing it the real challenge. I have managed to move the notes to a cloud drive and clean them up. We’ll see how this goes when I need to use it in the car (I cheated and tested this one while I was sitting at my desk in the office).

New / Old Tool

Posted on July 27, 2024 by Eric

I’m going to test out an old/new tool again. I had tried using voice to text previously and one of the things that slowed me down was always the amount of time that it took to edit these things. There’s no way to actually say, “hey that’s the end of a sentence”. The Voice to Text tool will actually spell out the word. Punctuation is the bane of voice to text. Pauses are not recognized.

Interestingly enough I think someone complained about that and if you pause long enough you can actually say. and get that actual result (see how that worked right there?)

I’m going to try this again. I can speak faster than I can type. The real question is how much editing do I need to do when all is said and done. I think it will be an interesting experiment. It will force me to look at the words that I create in a much more conversational format as well as giving them something of a flow that they might not have otherwise.

Maybe I get these stories, these words, these things to come crashing together faster and hope the editing process is easy. Maybe I get results that amount to a stream of consciousness that don’t really work out as good stories. Hopefully one of the things that I can do is make this stream of consciousness thing work for me and use my ability to tell a good story to actually create a good story on a page. Typing in this way, which isn’t really typing, I suppose I should at least be able to pull together words faster and more completely than I could do in a traditional typing manner. If I’m lucky I will be able to produce more, and do it more quickly.

I think this is going to be at least, in part, something that I’m going to have to learn and I’m going to have to spend time working with. Based on an articleI read recently, it was suggested that what I really need to do is learn to live with an absolutely terrible first draft. I tend to want my story to come out as close to finished as it can right from the start. I don’t like the editing process. Not that I think anyone likes the editing process, the editing process sucks.

This is the test and we’ll see if my production speed goes up. One of the things I really need to get better at is my speed. There are so many things going on that I really need to make the best use of my time and use tools that maybe I wouldn’t have thought were positive or useful or even for me. We’ll see how it goes.

Time to edit this post because I can already see a giant mess.

Do you have any tools that are your favorites? What tools help your productivity?

All The Discs

Posted on September 30, 2023 by Eric

There’s a meme out there with a picture of Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan saying, “why of course, it’s me…”

I know that’s a hash of a misquote, but you get the idea.

Using a physical DVD to watch a film. Yep, I know that guy, because it’s me. I’ve been one of the red envelope people subscribed to the Netflix DVD service for the past 12 years. It was an easy choice for me. Advertising and unreliable connection speeds meant I could watch what I had on hand without any fear of it failing to work or having the feel of a film wrecked by mid scene advertising… almost all the time. Yes, physical media does have issues. Yes, from time to time there would be a problem, but for the most part it was a fantastic albeit slow system. In all those years I can only think of a handful of times when either the disc was broken or didn’t work, and only once in all that time when I got frustrated enough to just digitally rent a movie when the disc failed – and that was because it failed about 60% of the way through a really good movie.

Now that system is gone.

Yesterday, Netflix DVD made their last shipment. After 25 years (for them) they’re done, and I am feeling a bit nostalgic about the whole thing. The discs have been one of a very few constant things over the years. I was able to pull down a PDF file, created by the Netflix folks, that has my history all packaged up and presented in a report. I haven’t crunched numbers for averages or anything like that, but I have looked at the list of more than 250 rentals I’ve had over that time (quick math, 250/12 = about 20 discs a year or just under 2 per month). I looked at the stats they’ve stacked up for me and wandered down the list of discs we’ve watched, remembering the stories and characters from all those movies.

It’s going to be a minute for me to process the whole thing, but I will miss it. That probably sounds weird, but it has been part of my life for more than a decade. It became something that was just there when I needed it. Recently the streaming services available to us, combined with a more stable internet experience and less available time, in general, have made streaming services far more convenient and my rental rate has fallen off. Sometimes it would be weeks before I could put together the time to sit with a friend or a family member to watch whatever it was we ordered up. Sometimes the streaming service would add the movie before we got to the disc. I’d package up the disc and send it back, eagerly waiting for the next one to arrive. It was there, and it happened when I wanted it to. My viewing experience was not subject to some vague streaming contract a studio made, nor allowed to change based on some other, unknown reason.

The best example I can think of to illustrate that off hand is Monsters, Inc. and how it’s shown on Disney+. My daughter and I sat to re-watch it the other day because it had been a very long time since we watched it originally and we were in just the right mood. We pulled it up on Disney+ and let it roll. When we got to the end we wanted to see the extra bit at the end where the company is putting on the play Mike and Sully improvised during the movie… and it wasn’t there. It was just gone. I was a bit sad, but she was downright outraged. “How dare they? This is unacceptable and look it up on YouTube right now so we can watch it!”. I think that encapsulates the whole thing. The nutshell version – streaming decided to revise history a la 1984 and the modern viewer simply slid over to another streaming service and looked up the part they knew should be there (legality of it all be damned).

So the service is gone, but physical media still exist. I’ll still be watching those, and definitely picking up my favorites in physical form so I don’t need to depend on some company deciding if Ponyo should be available or not. Yes, it takes up space on the shelf. Yes, it’s an outdated method for watching things, but it’s mine and I’ll do with it as I please.

Apparently the folks at Netflix were feeling a bit nostalgic as well. They captured the whole feeling in a quick video… now available from a streaming service.

Going Solar

Posted on July 17, 2022 by Eric

I don’t spend a lot of time here talking about day to day stuff in my life. There’s been a trend over the past few years to do exactly that – share every waking moment. I don’t believe I’m that interesting. I don’t believe there is anyone that interesting. Sometimes day to day stuff just needs to be unexceptional and plain. It gives both context and contrast to the things that are special or that hold more significance.

My family has had some special moments lately and has a couple of those coming up. The public doesn’t get everything. Some things are just for us.

What is not just for us is finally being in a position to try to do more to help others in our day to day lives here at Chez Hardenbrook. We’re getting solar power added to the house.

Adding solar power should be something easy, affordable and common but it sadly is not. Affordable alternative power is slow in coming to the residential market here in the US. We’ve looked at it for years now and simply haven’t had the money or been in a position where we could afford to add the equipment needed to our house. We have finally gotten there, and we signed the deal this past Friday.

Is it immediate? Of course not. During the height of the sunniest time of year for us here in the middle of Pennsylvania all we can do is sign up and wait. There’s a process to getting all this work lined up, the parts ordered, and of course the regulatory things squared away (building permit, utility permission, etc.). What does that mean? It means we’re going solar… eventually. IF everything works out, we should get a series of panels added to our roof sometime in early October this year. Just in time for the weather to turn grey, the days to get shorter and the actual amount of power we created to drop right off.

In the end, this isn’t about immediate returns. This is about making long term choices for the betterment of everyone. Over the course of the next year we should generate enough power that we don’t actually have to draw from the power grid. The next step along the way is getting a power generator or battery source set up so that when / if the power grid goes out we can continue to use that electricity we’re making.

Small steps, but consistent ones. Plan for the future in small steps and make it happen. Do what you can to help. Hopefully this step is a good one.

Changing Attitude?

Posted on April 11, 2021 by Eric

I once heard a very famous author state that he wanted nothing to do with the internet. He based this (I vaguely recall) on the idea that people would then be able to go back, digging into past comments or opinions he had posted from years ago, dragging them out and trying to judge them by some current standard. It was a prescient commentary from a science fiction author. We are now seeing what can happen when people go digging into the past, looking for any scrap of conversation made by (fill in person of choice) in years gone by. Once on the internet, out in public forever… I try to be mindful of this. Part of this past author’s comments were based around the idea that a person can learn, change and grow. The things that once were a passionate position may have been challenged and defeated. Education can happen. Changes in how a person lives, works, acts or presents themselves are common. This is true of anyone.

It’s also true that technology, truly successful technology, will find it’s way into your life. What was once edgy and new will move into the realm of the commonplace. Exceptional will become expected. Delivery methods of said technology will become streamlined and efficient. I place e-reader (Kindle specifically) in this category.

I saw that cartoon and it made me wonder how my opinions on certain things have aged. So I went digging (I am in no way known or popular enough to have people trying to dig things up on me). I was fearful that when I went to look at my posted blog comments they would contain the sort of statements that seem outlandish or desperately funny (or worse).

I was most shocked to discover that it has been 10 years since I first wrote about the Kindle. I got my first e-reader back at the end of 2010. It was a stand alone device. I remember my own hesitance toward the device. I occasionally argued against them. I didn’t like certain aspects, but the convenience very quickly won out. In the decade since the stand alone device has merged into phones and tablet tech. The e-book is ubiquitous and somehow the paperback survives. If you have a deep seeded need for nostalgia, you can check out my original post HERE and then check out the follow up a few months later HERE. The second one would definitely be a different vibe today. I don’t think most people would have any issues letting somebody peruse their book collection, but I don’t know anyone that would unlock their device and just hand it over to a coworker to check out… but that’s a topic for another day I suspect.

What’s on your bookshelf right now? Is it virtual?

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Fan, Author, Artist – Eric Hardenbrook

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