Field of Science

Someday we will hopefully have good dictation software. For now, there is Dragon Dictate

Mary Grover at Salon has distilled the essence of using Dragon Dictate into a brief post. I couldn't possibly do better -- or even as well -- so I refer you to it.

I was assured by several people that if I continued to use DragonDictate and use the vocabulary training feature, eventually the software would learn to do a better job. I made sure to diligently train Dragon on everything that I wrote. Unfortunately, it appears that training function itself is broken. I was suspicious that even when I used very unusual words, it always insisted that it already knew all those words. So I tested it by training on a set of made-up words. When Dragon happily announced that it already knew all of those words, too, I wrote an e-mail to technical support.
I wasn't very optimistic about hearing from technical support, since they had not replied to my previous e-mails when I have had other questions. This time, they replied promptly to tell me the technical support had expired, but that I could pay for extended technical support. Presumably, if I were to pay, they would go back to not answering e-mails.
I spend a lot of time at the computer, and I bought Dragon so that I wouldn't have to spend all of that time typing. I pace when I think, but pacing and typing don't mix. I thought Dragon would give me more flexibility. As of yet, this remains a distant dream.