It May be All Right on the Night
Maybe we were in too much of a hurry to get the latest instructions out for Talking Dictionary 8.4.0. Maybe I just assumed that my wife knew how to use the recording software I’d set up for her to use. Maybe I should have checked everything after she’d finished...

Actually, the last point is where it all went wrong. I realize that now. And I kick myself to think that I fell victim to something I have been constantly preaching to students and colleagues alike for over ten years now. “If its not been tested its not ready to go!”.

Talking Dictionary 8.4.0 was a great improvement over the original, with many new features and some complex controls requiring the drafting and recording of new instructions. My wife (the voice of RWF Talking Software) kindly agreed to record these new instructions for me once I had written them. So I set up the recorder and laid the microphone on the desk in the office. As my wife gets the giggles when I’m present, I left the room to do some work elsewhere. When I returned the audio instructions were recorded and finished.

I listened to the user guide, quick start guide and keystrokes to make sure that all had gone according to plan. The trouble is that after listening to each set of instructions I stopped the playback. I did not realize that my wife had had many “takes” or “attempts” at each segment and that all the failures were looped at the end of each recording!

Despite the fact that we shipped a large number of CDs with the “out takes” included in each section, we are lucky in two ways: first we are lucky that my wife has never said a profanity or curse word in her entire life. Otherwise we’d have been in a whole different sort of trouble! Second is the fact that only a few customers actually noticed that this mistake had been made, as once the instructions had finished being played they stopped playback manually instead of letting my wife go on with her giggles, squeaks, raspberries and various impersonations which, I am sure, will always make us laugh when we listen to them.

The audio segments have since been corrected and the bad elements discarded.

If you’d like to find out more about Talking Dictionary, please use the link below to navigate to the Talking Dictionary information and download pages:

Talking Dictionary Information

By Richard W. Fairbairn March 2006

If you were affected by anything you read in this article or if you would like to share a similar experience please feel free to contact Richard personally at webmaster@rwfts.com. Alternatively you can submit our feedback form which you can find by following this link: RWF Talking Software Feedback Form