Avoid typos and grammatical mistakes by listening to your writing
Published Sunday, April 23rd, 2006 at 5:09 pm
Often when you write something you can read it over and over again and miss the most obvious mistakes. What you are reading is what you meant to say not want you actually wrote. Zach Everson has a really cool tip for bloggers and writers in general. Have your computer dictate your writing back to you. Zach describes how to have your Mac read your text back to you. This can really help in spotting your typos and grammatical blunders. This is a great tip for me; considering how long I spend writing, spell checking, proofreading, spell checking again, proofreading again, then eventually deciding… hell… it’s good enough.
Only one problem…. I don’t use a Mac. Well, there must be a Windows solution, right? I tried fiddling around with Windows accessibility options but that proved seriously lacking. I considered using the Microsoft Speech SDK to develop my own program (I’m worked with this SDK before) but before diving into yet another programming task I searched the web for a few minutes and found Deskbot. According to the website:
DeskBot is a free, multi-featured Clipboard Reader, Text Reader, Time Announcer, Desktop Application for Microsoft Windows featuring Microsoft Agent Animated, Talking Characters.I was worried at first because DeskBot looks similar to Microsoft Agent and Bonzi Buddy two very hated pieces of software. The reason for the similarity is that Bonzi Buddy and DeskBot are both built on the Microsoft Agent technology. But unlike Bonzi Buddy, DeskBot is not spyware and unlike the Microsoft Agent built into office it won’t interrupt your work with stupid “helpful” messages (“Looks like you’re writing a suicide letter. Perhaps I can help”). DeskBot sits quietly in your tray and when activated will read any text copied onto the clipboard out loud. This makes it very simple to select the text you’ve written, press control-c, and hear your text read back to you. Hopefully now my blog will be less typo riddled. [Zach Everson link via Lifehacker]