This is BrainLog, a blog by Dan Sanderson. Older entries, from October 1999 through September 2010, are preserved for posterity, but are no longer maintained. See the front page and newer entries.

November 9, 2001

From Thursday's (11/8) NPR's All Things Considered:

Commentator Heather Havrilesky talks about using speech recognition technology to write a novel for a contest. November is "National Novel Writing Month" and a program has been set up for five thousand writers to write "laughably awful prose." They have one month and must write 50,000 words.

We tried this at a cafe on Wednesday using the dictation software that comes with Office XP, and didn't get nearly as accurate results as Heather did.