The end of 2009 and the start of dictation

I've got a new toy for Christmas. This is the first article I am dictating instead of writing. For Christmas, I got speech recognition software. It actually works quite well. The software is called Dragon Naturally Speaking and it is actually a continuation of the software of L&H that was sold off when they got bankrupt. One thing bugs me: it assumes that people speak only one language. It's not possible to buy another language to add to your system, you have to buy the software again, including a new microphone, for every other language you want to speak. If my computer had actually shipped with the English copy of Windows Vista, I would have had speech recognition all along. But my Windows copy is in Dutch, so it is impossible to get the English speech recognition engine to run on it. What's up with that? Again, some company assumes that I only speak one language. Since I was an adolescent, I am a multilingual person. I speak Dutch, French and English and then some. Operating systems and programs want to reduce me to a one language man. So on my wish list for 2010 I hope software will recognize the reality that most people on this planet speak more than one language.

Speaking of 2010, what else can we hope for? Is this going to be the year that an LMS system becomes less important? It is going to be the year that the we take care of collaboration and connections more and focus a little less on content in our education and training programs? Is it the year we will discover that training individuals doesn't really matter because everything is done in a team? Is it the year we will come out of a crisis which fresh ideas or will we continue where we left off? Is it going to be the year of the final breakthrough of e-books and e-readers, making books as free and as pirated as music in the process? Will this be the year where we will interact with computer systems  through gestures and touch rather than mouse clicks? We'll see it all when it happens.

Have a great year end and a good start of 2010!

Bert

PS: I did manually correct the dictation. The software [or my voice] is not perfect.