Pen/Dragon

A cross-country love story road trip involves a lot of driving and a lot of thinking. Thinking without being able to write down what you're thinking is torturous when your memory is as bad as mine. I want to be able to write while I drive, or at least get my thoughts in order. So I've been doing some Google and Wikipedia research on speech-to-text software.

I knew going in, of course, that Dragon is the industry leader, as it has been for the better part of a decade. I had expected, though, that by now it would have a number of competitors, including at least one freeware program distributed through SourceForge or something. Nope. My admittedly rather cursory research indicates that all other speech-to-text software is focused on letting you give your computer oral commands, build a phone menu where you "press or say 1," and so on; Dragon is the only program I found that types text as you say it. Dragon is pricey, receives mixed reviews, and only functions when you're using the official Dragon microphone headset; I don't know how I feel about wearing a headset while driving.

So I was pleased, as I was reaching the conclusion that I might have to shell out for an inferior product, to discover by accident that Windows Vista comes with a built-in dictator program, Windows Speech Recognition. This is really cool, since I'm going to need a new laptop for this project anyway. Apparently WSR is slightly behind Dragon in terms of accuracy -- but I'm just going to be talking to myself, I don't need a 100% accurate transcription. I wish I could find some kind of demo version that I could test on my XP desktop.