Serving Up a Fresh Voice with MacSpeech Dictate

“Blogging is my journal, so it has to be my voice; that’s the appeal,” explains Jaden Hair, who publishes a popular cooking blog called Steamy Kitchen. She uses MacSpeech Dictate to ensure her light, breezy style comes through — it’s the secret ingredient that brings her audience back on a regular basis to hear entertaining stories and learn scrumptious new recipes.

“I need to write the way I speak because people have fun reading it,” she adds. “I don’t like writing, so it can take me hours to write an article, but it goes much faster if I simply speak it. I wouldn’t still be blogging if it wasn’t for MacSpeech Dictate.” Jaden notes that the software was very easy to train when she first took it out of the box. “I didn’t even need to read the instructions,” she says. She had to train it to recognize ingredient names and measurements, but that was a simple process too, and now MacSpeech Dictate is her constant cooking companion, always ready to transcribe her unique recipes as well as her many tips and tricks.

Jaden’s favorite recipes include Sesame Seared Tuna with Lime Ginger Vinaigrette and Japanese Noodles with Shimeji Mushroom. The former provides many examples of her unique personal style, such as when she says: “Cooking with the wasabi paste on the tuna mellows out its sting. It just tastes better. Trust me. Use as much wasabi as you want.”

Additional Entrees
She uses MacSpeech Dictate with WordPress to compose her blog posts. WordPress also lets her manage the content on her blog, which opened for business in late February 2007. Jaden originally used the blog as an online repository for the Asian recipes her mother recited to her over the phone, but she soon realized she could take her distinctive voice — simmered to perfection during the hands-on cooking classes she taught locally — to the competitive culinary world through a variety of media.

Jaden also writes a regular newspaper column for the Tampa Tribune and is on the verge of becoming a published author with The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook. She regularly discusses her latest recipes on Tampa’s ABC and CBS TV affiliates — as well as the web site Good Bite, where she posts cooking videos — and in September 2009 she conducted a national interview with Meg Oliver on ABC News Now.

She relies on MacSpeech Dictate and Google Docs to create her newspaper column and write her cookbook. “I wanted to inspire people to cook,” Jaden says of her cookbook. “Getting my voice in there with MacSpeech Dictate lets me make it feel real and not forced. You want to feel like your friend is teaching you these recipes, not like you’re reading a textbook.”

By using Google Docs and WordPress, she can access her columns, blog posts, and cookbook drafts anywhere. In addition, she won’t lose any precious content in the unlikely event of a hard drive failure.

Another Bite of the Apple
Jaden’s first computer was an Apple II. She used Macs for a long time, but she switched to Windows in college before coming back to the Mac in early 2009. She returned to the Mac because she does a lot of photography and video for Steamy Kitchen (she even shot her own photos for her cookbook), and she prefers the Mac’s advantages with digital images and video.

With her cooking career at a full boil, MacSpeech Dictate has become a regular part of Jaden’s workflow. “If I’m not in the kitchen experimenting with recipes, I’m in front of the computer,” she says. “My husband and I both work from home, and sometimes he doesn’t know if I’m talking to him or the computer.”

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