For quite a long time I have been suffering from some form of RSI and have tried out different keyboards to try to alleviate the pain. The past three years I have been able to get by thanks to the TouchStream keyboard from FingerWorks. However, this company doesn't exist anymore and I've heard an increasing amount of reports about TouchStream keyboards that are failing. I know that mine will not last forever either and I'm starting to suffer from the fact that it's still a traditional keyboard with horizontally twisted hands. This is not a natural position and the strain it puts on my wrists is forcing me to take frequent breaks again.



I started looking for a new keyboard and found the AlphaGrips. It combines most of the things that I find important: no need to reach out for the mouse, vertically positioned hands, limited finger movements, and the ability to type while standing up. I've had it for almost three weeks now, and my typing speed is slowly becoming acceptable. Sadly, it's still a keyboard and I still need to move my fingers and position my hands in a certain way. I can already feel another kind of stress building up.

Last week I showed my AlphaGrips to Jonas Bonér at TSSJS Europe, and he told me that he also had serious problems with RSI. Recently he started using voice recognition and told me that it worked extremely well. This sounded very interesting, because when I played with voice recognition a few years ago, it really wasn't very useful at all.



When I came home from the conference, I ordered myself a copy of iListen and started training it with the Logitech headset that I've been using for Skype. While it sort of worked, the recognition rate was not good enough for it to be useful. It seems that for voice recognition software to be really precise, you need to have a specialized headset that's optimized for the task. I thus ordered one of the supported headsets, the Plantronics .Audio 85, and it arrived today.

Holy Moses! As soon as I started using this headset, the recognition rate really increased up to at least 95 percent! I'm going to try to use voice recognition now for as many tasks as possible. It's great that technology allows geeks to continue to spend an obscene amount of time in front of the computer!