Business
Are you ready to ditch your keyboard? Scott Baker is an expert in all things Dragon Dictation. If you want to learn to train your Dragon, Scott’s your man. Scott’s official bio: Scott Baker has written dozens of books under various pen names and spent most of the last decade working as a freelance writer for numerous publications in the UK. He first began dabbling with Dragon voice recognition software in the late 1990s when it was, quite frankly, terrible. Things have improved dramatically since then and Scott now uses dictation on a daily basis, taking advantage of the tricks and techniques used by professionals within the speech recognition industry to write thousands of words per hour. More importantly, he’s developed books and courses to help you master Dragon Dictation and incorporate it into your writing lifestyle. What you need to know: Learning Dragon Dictation will cost you money, time and practice. In this episode, we chat about the following: boosting your workflow 2-10k words transcription what equipment you will need to invest in workflow training your dragon Alexa, Google Home & Siri accuracy ditching your keyboard and much more You can find out more about Scott, and Training Your Dragon books and courses here. You can listen to my first podcast chat with Scott here. You can download Issue 3 of Author Success Magazine here. Read Full Transcript Mel Scott Baker is an expert in all things Dragon Dictation. If you want to learn to train your Dragon, he’s your man. In this interview, we’re getting into the nitty gritty of how we can use the dictation tool to improve our writing. Scott, tell us about the course you’re running. Scott It basically takes you through everything you need to get started with Dragon and make the software part of your writing workflow. It’s available for both Mac and PC, and explores not just Dragon specifically but dictation itself – the act of using dictation, as opposed to just perfecting your use of the software. I made the course because, although I’ve written a book on this subject (‘How to Train Your Dragon’), there’s only so much you can put in a book. The amount of questions I get every single day… Most of my day is just answering emails, and I eventually thought it’d be easier if I could just show everyone – if I could just put it in a course. So that’s what I did. It’s hours and hours and hours long, but that’s okay because literally every single step is covered, from setting up to making it as accurate as it can be over time. It’s a course about using dictation as part of a business; about integrating it and viewing it as a long-term thing. The goal is to use dictation instead of a keyboard, really. Forget the keyboard – that’s for editing, later. The course is about getting your first draft done with Dragon. Mel Let’s start at the beginning. What’s the first thing we need to know? Scott I get a lot of people asking me that same question – how do I start? Unfortunately you’re going to have to accept that this is going to cost money. Whichever way you look at it, the software is expensive. But it’s an investment – an investment in your writing career. Dictation leads to an enormous boost to your workflow. Part of the reason I got started with it is I can’t type very fast. I’ve had...