Wanted borrow: a (usb?) microphone for a pc; disabled need

Tue 5 Sep 2017, 17:07

Alas, increasing disability is reducing a one-time touchtypist to single finger pecking - and spinal injuries increasingly limit my ability to spend time over sitting over a keyboard. There is always learning to Microwrite - see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyKey, but time at a desk is still a race against time and muscles collapsing with fatigue. I've just got one to try anyway but it's still quite rough on the back and shoulder and fingers needing to sit at a desk - albeit leaning back more and not hunched over a keyboard helps, but early days learning it yet! One seemed to learn muscle-memory stuff so much better 30 years ago...

But what about dictation and speech-to-text transcription? For that I need a decent microphone, and preferably one that I can use to lean back from over a keyboard to reduce the muscle overstrain and discomfort that easily becomes thought-disruptingly intrusive. But it seems these dictation programs are sensitive to quality of speech pickup.

Anyone got a good microphone (usb mikes apparently work best, due to not routing signals through layers of what can be not-so-hot audio pickups, adaptors, wiring, writing signal to digital so forth) Anyone got one I could borrow to try this out to see if it is a solution? Something cordless would be ideal, as per problems sitting up shackled to a table due to spinal injuries for any time...

Another option is a dictation recorder, rather than being tied to a micrphonewirecomputer link for basic "composing"? Where a stored file or recording is sent to the pc for transcription. I'm going to see if a broken-screened but otherwise working iPhone or an old Samsung Android smartphone can be put into service for this (see what googling brings up). No idea if the built-in microphones are good enough for this purpose, but on the principle of reduce-reuse-recycle maybe one of them can be repurposed. Or perhaps someone has an old dictation recorder that can input to a computer I could try to see if dictation will work for me to write stuff down in a timely manner?

Anyone had any experience of using speech to text for business or for countering the effects of disability or just plain old convenience? Be nice to pick brains, get any pointers etc.

Well, that ended up longer than thought it would, one-fingered at arms length on laptop propped up on a bed. Still, more comfy than writing at the table...