No, I'm not referring to dragons as in a new book direction, but rather the Dragon software by Nuance (formerly Dragon Naturally Speaking). I was a tester back in the dinosaur age of computers for voice recognition software. It worked well, but had difficulty understanding my cadence and occasionally dropping of a consonant when speaking.
Fast forward from ancient history to today and I'm a happy camper. I picked up the home version for less than $100 on sale before the end of the year. After just 10 minutes I had it installed, trained and ready to go. This time it understands me just fine, performance is greatly enhanced by newer hardware and the headset doesn't require batteries, yay!!
If you're a writer who has arthritis and who's hands hurt when it's cold out (like me), I'd strongly recommend picking it up. The software is very powerful, but to just to basic dictation doesn't require a degree in IT...in fact I think this software would be easy enough for my mother to use, which is saying a lot!
The trouble I have now is finding the time to actually sit and write with it. My poor phone has several voice recordings of ideas to transfer over (yes, it will take a recording from your smart phone and translate it!) and I'm itching to test it out, but first I must finish my tech writing contract.
