My journey with dictation has not been easy, but I’ve been kind of stubbornly trying to make it work, because I want to write faster, and I also want to protect my wrists, which started giving me problems many years ago when I was still offering critiques with my Story Sensei critique service. I had to stop that because my right wrist was having issues.
Last year, I took a dictation boot camp by Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer, and I liked it a lot. It was mostly aimed at people who had never done dictation before, while I had been dictating for a few years, although not very successfully sometimes. I still found the boot camp helpful, and I bought her fiction dictation online class, which she calls Fictation. I went through the course and enjoyed it.
She started a supplement to her dictation course called the Fictator-in-Training Roadmap, which goes through her dictation online class and then also includes some additional coaching, so I decided to buy it. At the moment, the roadmap course is going through her dictation online class week by week, so I’m going through her Fictation course again.
The first week in her dictation online course is all about the tech. I appreciate the fact that she makes an effort to try all the different apps that have been suggested by other people who take her boot camp course so she can show how they compare in terms of accuracy and ease of use.
I also appreciate the fact that she completely ignores anything too high priced, so she does not go into Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which was covered pretty thoroughly by Scott Baker, or any other software that costs a lot of money. Her focus is on making dictation accessible to anyone so that they don’t need to spend a lot of money to do it.
The tech portion of the dictation online course is quite useful to see the options available now. However, I also like what she said about how you shouldn’t get too attached to whatever app or method you use, because apps will come and go, and you may need to pivot to using something else down the line.
When I first started dictation, I tried the dictation function on my computer, which wasn’t really all that bad at the time, but it was still frustrating how inaccurate it could be at times. I ended up buying Dragon, naturally speaking, which I needed to run on my MacBook Pro using Parallels Desktop in order to run the Windows operating system. Dragon NaturallySpeaking is quite accurate, especially if you follow Scott Baker’s method of training Dragon right out of the box so that it’s only familiar with your writing and your style.
The biggest problem with Dragon is that it’s incredibly expensive. When the old version I bought in 2013 no longer worked with the Windows operating system, I was forced to buy the newest version of Dragon. In addition, I had to keep paying a subscription to Parallels to use the software just to use Dragon on my computer. I’ve considered buying a Windows laptop solely to run Dragon off of, but haven’t gotten to that point yet.
I also started dictating more while walking, and while at first I only did an MP3 recording and then had Dragon transcribe it, I also started experimenting with the mobile app Dragon Anywhere. What I liked about it was that, just like Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I could train the app on how I pronounce certain words, including character names, which was a game-changer for me. It prevented a lot of mistakes that made it through my self-edit, and I was more sure that my dictation had the right spelling of the right names to begin with.
When I first started using Dragon Anywhere, the software wasn’t very accurate, but after a few years, I tried it again, and the accuracy has improved remarkably. The accuracy of Dragon Anywhere is about the same as the dictation function on my MacBook Pro computer, except that with Dragon Anywhere, I can train the app on custom words, such as names. For some people, they don’t care, but for me, I really appreciate that.
The problem, of course, is that Dragon Anywhere is also expensive. It requires either a monthly subscription or you can pay a large lump sum for lifetime access.
Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer doesn’t review Dragon Anywhere, probably because of the cost, but I have to say that I enjoy using it. The microphone on my iPhone is pretty good, although I also bought a Bluetooth headset and added a foam cover for the microphone as a windscreen, and that is not only accurate but also very convenient.
However, I still flip back and forth between using Dragon Anywhere, which is a live transcription that transcribes as you dictate, and recording my dictation using a digital voice recorder and then having another program transcribe it. While I have fewer errors when I use Dragon Anywhere, I’m also pausing often to correct things that the program got wrong or to rearrange sentences. When I use the digital voice recorder, I often will simply repeat the sentence over and over until it sounds the way I want it to, which is faster. It takes a little extra time in the cleanup process to delete the extra sentences, but it’s much easier to do that on my computer later than on my phone while I’m walking.
Both methods enable me to dictate while walking, which has been a huge improvement for me. When I’m in front of my desk, sometimes I have a hard time getting started because I’m distracted by all the things that I need to do on my computer, mostly marketing work. When I’m walking, I’m not distracted and can just get started.
One of the main reasons I wanted to really make dictation work is because I discovered that I write a lot better when I’m walking. An author on a podcast mentioned a study that said that walking can make people 60% more creative. That might explain why I write better when I’m walking, but I haven’t actually read the study in question, so I’m only going by hearsay.
This year, instead of using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I got a subscription to a website called storyspeak.ai. It transcribes dictation using AI, which ends up being a bit faster than Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It ends up being the same amount of money as a Parallels subscription for the year, but I don’t need to keep buying Dragon NaturallySpeaking every time there’s an update to the program or an update to the Windows operating system.
What I dislike about the program is that the AI will often edit my dictation. My dictation is incredibly messy, and I’m leaving lots of notes for myself, and because the AI doesn’t understand that, it will try to correct whatever I dictated. So, notes to myself will either disappear or the AI will try to create a sentence out of them, and it’s not always clear what exactly I originally dictated.
It is much easier to use storyspeak.ai rather than firing up Parallels, and then Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and then transcribing my audio file that way. With storyspeak.ai, I only need to upload my file, and it will transcribe it. However, the issues I’m having have made me wonder if I want to continue using it after my subscription ends later this year.
I still go back and forth between using Dragon Anywhere and my digital voice recorder and storyspeak.ai. I haven’t committed to one app or the other, which I think is a good thing. On some days, I want to see my words as I’m dictating them, especially if my thoughts are especially jumbled and I’m having problems forming the sentences exactly how I want them. At those times, it’s easier to dictate into Dragon Anywhere and watch the words as they transcribe on the screen, and then correct the sentence either by typing or by dictating over what I just wrote.
But when I use a digital voice recorder, I definitely write more and write faster. The cleanup is more work, but one of the benefits of using storyspeak.ai is that it will often correct errors I have made, such as if I stuttered or started a sentence, stopped, and then started it again. So, I suppose if I can find a way to get storyspeak.ai to not delete or change my author notes, it would be superior to Dragon NaturallySpeaking since I don’t have to worry about homophones and the AI will correct some of my minor errors automatically.
UPDATE May 27, 2025: For Mac users, I had forgotten about a free app called MacWhisper, which does both live dictation and audio file transcription. For Android users, I discovered a new AI transcription website called turboscribe.ai, which uses Whisper by OpenAI. It will transcribe up to three 30-minute audio files per day for free. More or longer audio files require a subscription. However, both of those don’t allow me to speak my punctuation, which is a deal-breaker for me, unfortunately. For now, I’ll stick with Dragon Everywhere or Storyspeak.ai.
Another option for those kinds of errors is taking the dictation from Dragon NaturallySpeaking and putting it into ChatGPT and asking it to make corrections. Many other authors, including Elana Johnson, do that, and Chat is very good at correcting grammatical errors and inserting paragraph breaks.
Anyway, that’s my thoughts from week 1 of the Fictator-in-Training Roadmap course and on dictation in general.
Last year, I took a dictation boot camp by Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer, and I liked it a lot. It was mostly aimed at people who had never done dictation before, while I had been dictating for a few years, although not very successfully sometimes. I still found the boot camp helpful, and I bought her fiction dictation online class, which she calls Fictation. I went through the course and enjoyed it.
She started a supplement to her dictation course called the Fictator-in-Training Roadmap, which goes through her dictation online class and then also includes some additional coaching, so I decided to buy it. At the moment, the roadmap course is going through her dictation online class week by week, so I’m going through her Fictation course again.
The first week in her dictation online course is all about the tech. I appreciate the fact that she makes an effort to try all the different apps that have been suggested by other people who take her boot camp course so she can show how they compare in terms of accuracy and ease of use.
I also appreciate the fact that she completely ignores anything too high priced, so she does not go into Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which was covered pretty thoroughly by Scott Baker, or any other software that costs a lot of money. Her focus is on making dictation accessible to anyone so that they don’t need to spend a lot of money to do it.
The tech portion of the dictation online course is quite useful to see the options available now. However, I also like what she said about how you shouldn’t get too attached to whatever app or method you use, because apps will come and go, and you may need to pivot to using something else down the line.
When I first started dictation, I tried the dictation function on my computer, which wasn’t really all that bad at the time, but it was still frustrating how inaccurate it could be at times. I ended up buying Dragon, naturally speaking, which I needed to run on my MacBook Pro using Parallels Desktop in order to run the Windows operating system. Dragon NaturallySpeaking is quite accurate, especially if you follow Scott Baker’s method of training Dragon right out of the box so that it’s only familiar with your writing and your style.
The biggest problem with Dragon is that it’s incredibly expensive. When the old version I bought in 2013 no longer worked with the Windows operating system, I was forced to buy the newest version of Dragon. In addition, I had to keep paying a subscription to Parallels to use the software just to use Dragon on my computer. I’ve considered buying a Windows laptop solely to run Dragon off of, but haven’t gotten to that point yet.
I also started dictating more while walking, and while at first I only did an MP3 recording and then had Dragon transcribe it, I also started experimenting with the mobile app Dragon Anywhere. What I liked about it was that, just like Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I could train the app on how I pronounce certain words, including character names, which was a game-changer for me. It prevented a lot of mistakes that made it through my self-edit, and I was more sure that my dictation had the right spelling of the right names to begin with.
When I first started using Dragon Anywhere, the software wasn’t very accurate, but after a few years, I tried it again, and the accuracy has improved remarkably. The accuracy of Dragon Anywhere is about the same as the dictation function on my MacBook Pro computer, except that with Dragon Anywhere, I can train the app on custom words, such as names. For some people, they don’t care, but for me, I really appreciate that.
The problem, of course, is that Dragon Anywhere is also expensive. It requires either a monthly subscription or you can pay a large lump sum for lifetime access.
Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer doesn’t review Dragon Anywhere, probably because of the cost, but I have to say that I enjoy using it. The microphone on my iPhone is pretty good, although I also bought a Bluetooth headset and added a foam cover for the microphone as a windscreen, and that is not only accurate but also very convenient.
However, I still flip back and forth between using Dragon Anywhere, which is a live transcription that transcribes as you dictate, and recording my dictation using a digital voice recorder and then having another program transcribe it. While I have fewer errors when I use Dragon Anywhere, I’m also pausing often to correct things that the program got wrong or to rearrange sentences. When I use the digital voice recorder, I often will simply repeat the sentence over and over until it sounds the way I want it to, which is faster. It takes a little extra time in the cleanup process to delete the extra sentences, but it’s much easier to do that on my computer later than on my phone while I’m walking.
Both methods enable me to dictate while walking, which has been a huge improvement for me. When I’m in front of my desk, sometimes I have a hard time getting started because I’m distracted by all the things that I need to do on my computer, mostly marketing work. When I’m walking, I’m not distracted and can just get started.
One of the main reasons I wanted to really make dictation work is because I discovered that I write a lot better when I’m walking. An author on a podcast mentioned a study that said that walking can make people 60% more creative. That might explain why I write better when I’m walking, but I haven’t actually read the study in question, so I’m only going by hearsay.
This year, instead of using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I got a subscription to a website called storyspeak.ai. It transcribes dictation using AI, which ends up being a bit faster than Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It ends up being the same amount of money as a Parallels subscription for the year, but I don’t need to keep buying Dragon NaturallySpeaking every time there’s an update to the program or an update to the Windows operating system.
What I dislike about the program is that the AI will often edit my dictation. My dictation is incredibly messy, and I’m leaving lots of notes for myself, and because the AI doesn’t understand that, it will try to correct whatever I dictated. So, notes to myself will either disappear or the AI will try to create a sentence out of them, and it’s not always clear what exactly I originally dictated.
It is much easier to use storyspeak.ai rather than firing up Parallels, and then Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and then transcribing my audio file that way. With storyspeak.ai, I only need to upload my file, and it will transcribe it. However, the issues I’m having have made me wonder if I want to continue using it after my subscription ends later this year.
I still go back and forth between using Dragon Anywhere and my digital voice recorder and storyspeak.ai. I haven’t committed to one app or the other, which I think is a good thing. On some days, I want to see my words as I’m dictating them, especially if my thoughts are especially jumbled and I’m having problems forming the sentences exactly how I want them. At those times, it’s easier to dictate into Dragon Anywhere and watch the words as they transcribe on the screen, and then correct the sentence either by typing or by dictating over what I just wrote.
But when I use a digital voice recorder, I definitely write more and write faster. The cleanup is more work, but one of the benefits of using storyspeak.ai is that it will often correct errors I have made, such as if I stuttered or started a sentence, stopped, and then started it again. So, I suppose if I can find a way to get storyspeak.ai to not delete or change my author notes, it would be superior to Dragon NaturallySpeaking since I don’t have to worry about homophones and the AI will correct some of my minor errors automatically.
UPDATE May 27, 2025: For Mac users, I had forgotten about a free app called MacWhisper, which does both live dictation and audio file transcription. For Android users, I discovered a new AI transcription website called turboscribe.ai, which uses Whisper by OpenAI. It will transcribe up to three 30-minute audio files per day for free. More or longer audio files require a subscription. However, both of those don’t allow me to speak my punctuation, which is a deal-breaker for me, unfortunately. For now, I’ll stick with Dragon Everywhere or Storyspeak.ai.
Another option for those kinds of errors is taking the dictation from Dragon NaturallySpeaking and putting it into ChatGPT and asking it to make corrections. Many other authors, including Elana Johnson, do that, and Chat is very good at correcting grammatical errors and inserting paragraph breaks.
Anyway, that’s my thoughts from week 1 of the Fictator-in-Training Roadmap course and on dictation in general.
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