I’m Kevin and I’ve been watching Leo since the old Screensavers. I’m of an age where I feel like I’ve been using computers since I can remember, but I have lived through dial-up, so I’ve been around a while. I would consider myself an early adopter, like most of us in this community. Part of that probably comes from the fact that I do have cerebral palsy spastic quadriplegia and I’m always looking for tech that makes it easier for me to do and control things. I use Alexa for everything. That said, I’ve used them all and I have not less than four easily accessible voice assistants within three feet of where I’m sitting, so I’m that kind of crazy.
That’s probably a good lead-in to tell you that I do use speech recognition, so if you see anything that doesn’t quite make sense, I’ve probably missed a word correction and you can ask me.
I’m a Windows 10 user, at least partially because of the speech recognition. My voice profile for Dragon NaturallySpeaking is so well-trained at this point that I don’t want to have to start over by going to a Mac. I run on an Alienware 17 R4 that’s a few years old now. I would say I’m an aspirational gamer who doesn’t quite have the motor skills or reflexes, but maybe one day. If anyone has any tips on making Rocket League work better with these issues, I would greatly appreciate it. I’ve tried VoiceAttack, but I can’t seem to tune it quite right.
Outside of tech, my day-to-day job is working as a corporate blogger at a financial services company. Ten years ago, I’m not sure we could be convinced that that was a viable job description, so the thing I really love about tech is that it touches everything. In fact, one of my favorite moments was on an episode of TWiT where one of the guests mentioned the Liftware Level. I went out and got that motorized spoon and it changed my life. Tech leads to these “a ha” moments of magic. That’s the best part!
I too lived through dialup and boy am I glad we all survived. Thanks for joining in.