{"id":3057,"date":"2011-08-10T00:01:19","date_gmt":"2011-08-10T07:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=3057"},"modified":"2013-02-10T12:53:33","modified_gmt":"2013-02-10T19:53:33","slug":"dictation-capitalization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=3057","title":{"rendered":"Dictation Capitalization"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nIt’s a trick I often forget, but one that is insanely handy: Dictating into your Android phone.
\n
\nDictation has come a long way, and I’ve got to say it again: The dictation feature on the Android phones really blows me away. It’s fast and mostly accurate. I don’t know why people don’t use it more.<\/p>\n

I don’t know why I<\/em> don’t use it more!<\/p>\n

To use dictation, simply touch the microphone button. There’s one found on the onscreen keyboard, and if your device has a physical keyboard it might also sport a microphone button.<\/p>\n

Oh, and you need Internet access to use dictation. The phone has to check in with Google to do the actual translation.<\/p>\n

Generally, I dictate text messages. That’s because few people expect them to be accurate so I have lots of wiggle room with my responses.<\/p>\n

The only drawback to dictation is punctuation.<\/p>\n

You can pronounce things like period<\/em>, comma<\/em>, exclamation point<\/em>, and question mark<\/em>. It works.<\/p>\n

What doesn’t work, however, is capitalizing a word in the middle of a sentence.<\/p>\n

Yes, I tried everything: I tried yelling CAP<\/em> into the phone. No luck. I tried saying CAPITAL<\/em> before a word. Nothing.<\/p>\n

The clumsy solution is to back and manually edit your text. That works: You can back up and erase a character and replace it with its upper case equivalent.<\/p>\n

But that’s not dictation!<\/em><\/p>\n

Fortunately, I have a solution.<\/p>\n

Well, actually I<\/em> don’t have a solution. A very clever reader named Barbara R. came up with a solution.<\/p>\n

Ms. R. is a smart cookie. (I won’t cite her professional experience, but suffice it to say that it’s impressive.) She insists on proper punctuation and spelling even in a text message. So getting those capital letters in there is important.<\/p>\n

My solution of editing the text to change a letter to upper case just isn’t efficient enough. So Mr. R. utters the word period<\/em> before a word that needs to be capitalized. The net effect is that the dictation feature believes one sentence has ended and a new one begun. Therefore, the next word is automatically capitalized.<\/p>\n

After dictating, Mr. R finds it easier to go back and edit out the periods from the dictated sentence. The end result is a properly-capitalized utterance.<\/p>\n

Thank you, Barbara, for this elegant, work-around solution for dictation capitalization!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dictation has come a long way, and I’ve got to say it again: The dictation feature on the Android phones really blows me away. It’s fast and mostly accurate. I don’t know why people don’t use it more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-3057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-android"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3057"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4117,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3057\/revisions\/4117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}