I had dinner with Mr. Jalopy a couple of nights ago and he mentioned an e-mail I'd sent to him earlier in the week, in which I described how much I like my recently-purchased Dragon Dictate 2.0 speech-to-text application.
He told me, "In your e-mail you said that you hoped that you didn't sound too chatty. You didn't sound too chatty, but you sounded like you were crazy."
I understand what he meant. It's a lot easier for me to talk than it is to type, because I am a pathetically clumsy typist. But typing forces me to slow down and organize my thoughts, instead of running off at the mouth. However, I am so pleased with DragonDictate's accuracy, and how it saves wear and tear on my hands and wrists, that I am sold on it and never want to go back to typing.
The application costs $(removed) on Amazon, which may seem steep, but it comes with a nice USB headset. It takes only about five minutes to train the application to learn how you speak.The last time I tried using a speech-to-text application, the training took much longer and the accuracy was terrible. Also, this was many years ago, and computers were much slower so it took forever for the words to appear on the screen after I said them. I swore off speech-to-text programs, until I heard Alex Lindsay on MacBreak weekly talk about how much he loved Dragon Dictate. I decided to give it a try myself.
It's magical seeing my words appear on the screen almost as fast as I utter them. I think I would probably be too embarrassed to use DragonDictate in an environment where other people could hear me talking to my computer. I work alone in a home office, so it works for me.