Can Rev turn text to speech and record it?

Bernard Devlin bdrunrev at gmail.com
Sun Apr 12 13:36:14 EDT 2009


It's a strange world.  One of my contemporaries is a smart lawyer
(many degrees).  Yet despite having a computer on his desk for 20
years, he still gets completely confused by anything new that happens
on the computer (and he's not the only lawyer I know like that).
Today he called me because some form he needed to fill in required
Acrobat to be installed.  He was confused to find himself on the Adobe
site instead of the government site he'd been on.  And he couldn't
understand why he needed to download and install extra software in
order to fill in a form in his browser.  Talking him through filling
out the form in Adobe was another major feat because it didn't behave
anything like a web page or like a native application.

Meanwhile my father who is in his 70s (and who'd been a manual
labourer who left school at 14) picked up his first PC about 5 years
ago.  He went to a few IT classes for the elderly, and is now using it
for word processing and spreadsheets.

I'm guessing that if my father was in the position of my friend with
regard to being on the Adobe site, he'd cope with downloading and
installing the software with more ease.  There seems to be a lot of
variation in ability between people when it comes to their mental
models about how to work with computers, and that might be a bigger
factor than age or education.

Mind you, I sometimes wonder if my own dislike of things like Facebook
and Twitter shows that my enjoyment of computer-related matters has
ossified.

Bernard

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Richard Miller <wow at together.net> wrote:
> Kay,
>
> It couldn't be too soon (for me) for that tech-savvy younger generation to
> take over this sector. But right now, there are large parts of it that are
> still operating as if it was 30 years ago.
>
> Here's one recent encounter I had with a customer of one of my other golf
> software products. This fellow ordered my software online and couldn't get
> it working. We went back and forth via email, trying to sort out the
> problem. Nothing he was saying made sense to me; and nothing I said seemed
> to work for him. He simply kept saying it wouldn't run.
>
> He finally explained that he was clicking the download link at my web site,
> watched the software download, but nothing happened after that. Turns out,
> he had no idea where anything goes after he downloads something from his
> browser! He said to me, "I have this problem a lot. I download various
> programs, but none of them ever work!"
>
> By the time I was done with him, he discovered where they all were. In all
> fairness, though, he did explain at the outset that he was a rather elderly
> golf pro and "didn't really understand computers very well."
>
> There are more of these folks out there than one might think. And Windows
> doesn't make it any easier for them. Now if there were only Mac's in the
> world...
>
> Richard Miller



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