I remember back when – heck, it must of been more than a decade ago that dictation software really hit the market. And it wasn’t very good.  It was a literal pain in the backside. You would have to train the software to understand your voice.

You worked over and over again and had to go through many hours of teaching it how you say things.  You were continually correcting what it decided you were saying. It made some of the strangest sentences out of what you felt was pretty straightforward conversation. The problem was two-fold back then.

First, early versions really couldn’t deal with regional accents so if there was a bit of twang or maybe some Nor’easter lilt to a voice, it just puked. Second, these programs didn’t have a very large vocabulary. I remember saying touchscreen and it being interpreted as such burning.

Now however, the software has gotten so much smarter.  It’s pretty amazing. In fact, this entire post was written using the Dragon dictation app on my iPad.  I did it in one take. I had to go back and correct just a couple of tiny little things like punctuation.  None of the words were wrong.  Very cool – very very cool.

If you haven’t tried dictation software in a while, I highly recommend it. It is so far ahead of where it used to be. And no, Dragon dictation did not pay me to write this 🙂

Chris Doelle