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miked

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It is important to point out that I'm a slow/lousy typist, and as such, when possible, I use a program called Dragonspeak in an attempt to make things easier. It is a program where I speak into a microphone, and the program types what I said (with at least some degree of accuracy).

I point that out because it might be the cause of a strange situation I encountered a few moments ago as I attempted to reply to a post.

In "dictating" the reply, all went as usual until I said the word "repayment"-at which time I was sent to a web site that advertised it would "help me pay my debts". I was startled at first, then work my way back to the "reply to topic" screen, thinking that I had inadvertently hit a key, or clicked the mouse, or something. It occurred again, then again when I was sure I was touching nothing related to the computer.
{Of course it didn't happen when I said the same word in this paragraph} :(

Later on, while writing the same reply, I said the words "diving gear", and was directed to a site that advertised diving gear. It recurred when I said "dive gear".
{Of course it didn't happen when I said the same words in this paragraph } :(

Has anyone encountered this problem before?
Is it me, "Dragonspeak", or something specific to the SB site.( I have not used "Dragonspeak" on any other web site, to know if this would occur there.

Thanks,
Mike
 
Has anyone encountered this problem before?
Is it me, "Dragonspeak", or something specific to the SB site.( I have not used "Dragonspeak" on any other web site, to know if this would occur there.

It's absolutely nothing on SB.

It might be something in DragonSpeak, but I'd lean more towards malware that's attached itself to your browser.

Terry
 
Strange.

It's nothing that we do, that I'm sure of.
 
My free-range guess (not quite as unfettered as a wild guess, but certainly not caged) would be that ye olde Dragon may be clicking on the text-based ads, probably only when one particularly matches something you're saying. I'm assuming that it wouldn't do anything for graphical ads, but since both Google and Yahoo have text ads, perhaps the software thinks you're trying to click on those links. ("Buy Scuba Diving Gear" and "House Payments Fall Again" are two of the ad links on the left side of my screen right now -- rather similar to the words you've mentioned.) I've not used the software myself, so I don't know exactly how it may provide for spoken "clicking on links", but it seems like a potential idea, given the words in question.

Actually, this should be easy enough to test (if it's that simple). Next time you see a Google or Yahoo text-based ad on the left side, speak the underlined words of the link. If it "clicks" the link for you, you know that's what was happening. If saying the linked words doesn't do anything, well, I'm probably out of ideas for the moment.


By the way, supporting members *can* choose to turn off the ads, so if it *is* an interaction between certain ads and your speech recognition software, that would be a much simpler way to manage it than having to type everything, and you'd be supporting ScubaBoard, too! :biggrin: (Apologies if that sounded too much like a sales pitch. I can't really think of any significantly better way to phrase it, so I just went with it. :D)
 
Or you could dragonspeak into your word processing program, then copy and paste into ScubaBoard. I did that with this post and reaped the added advantage of Word catching my typos and misspellings.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/swift/

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