Since the MacSpeech Scribe attempts were not successful as far as transcription goes, I decided to try out a different type of voice-recognition called Dragon Dictate.

Dragon Dictate is not really for transcription, but it’s super cool in many  other ways.  All you have to do is go through an initial training session with your voice and then you can get Dragon Dictate to do a whole bunch of things for you on your computer.

Simple commands like “Open Microsoft Word” or Open *whatever your program name is* are pretty cool, and then once your program of choice is open you can do all sorts of things there too.  Word can work as a type of transcription in that you speak to the computer and it types what you’re saying.  You can actually say stuff like “New paragraph”, you can select a piece of text and replace it with something else, and you can even speak your punctuation and it will all show up properly.

All in all it was far simpler to use than I had expected, far more accurate, and I’ll bet there is lots more that I can do with it than I realize.  And hey, if I happen to break my hands one day by accident, I can still get some work done!