Herself can’t type.

This isn’t any reflection on her abilities normally as Arthritis tends to limit digital dexterity somewhat and is a valid reason. So if it’s a one or two word message she wants to send she can manage, but anything longer generally means I have to type as she dictates.

I don’t mind dictation. The only problem is that I tend to embellish messages somewhat [just my little warped sense of humour] so a couple of her contacts are beginning to comment on her unusually florid language. As a result my callings for dictation purposes have dropped off somewhat. I don’t think she’s impressed.

Anyhows she came up with a suggestion last week that was quite interesting. She asked if it was possible to use voice recognition so she could be independent when it came to messaging. This was an interesting little project so I said I would see what I could do.

Sadly voice recognition is one of those rare areas where Linux falls down. However, her laptop has dual boot into Windows 10 which she has never used. I logged into my own Windows 11 and tried a drop of voice recognition and it seemed to work in an elementary way. I fired up her laptop into Windows and logged in.

Big mistake.

Naturally Windows went ballistic with little messages pinging up telling me my trial periods in a load of software had expired [along with pleas to subscribe to their services. Then it started updating. It kept rebooting back into Linux so I had to keep rebooting into Windows. That was on Friday.

On Sunday it finally announced it had finished and told me to reboot. It then locked up and I had to force it to shut down. I eventually got it running again.

I started investigating voice recognition but everything was so fucking slow that I didn’t really get anywhere. In the end, Herself got tired of hearing the unending flow of obscenities and said she had changed her mind, that I was to go back into Linux and that she would stick with her old one or two word replies.

I confess to an overwhelming relief at getting out of Windows Hell. She’ll be grand with one or two word replies on Farcebook.

I find two words are frequently sufficient.