Talking to your phone, and your computer, is starting to make sense

One of the great boons of smartphones is it brings computing and connectivity to entire populations that couldn't afford it before. We've heard about farmers in places like Kenya and such that can track market prices of their products where they couldn't easily before. Banking and micro loans have come to populations that didn't have easy access to banking. Now through smartphones and the internet they do.

After 40 years with either a laptop or a desktop computer, I don't see myself ever completely weaning myself off of a regular computer. Like those people whose first computer experiences were a smartphone, I am doing more and more with just my smartphone. In fact I'm writing this on my smartphone.

No typing on a smartphone is not really conducive to large creation of documents. But I'm getting more and more adept at dictation. My Google Pixel 4A is good at understanding what I'm saying especially if I'm in a quiet room as, I am now. I can even put in punctuation as necessary.

I'm writing this because I find that a lot of people, especially people my age over 60, think of the dictation capabilities as a gadget. I'm not sure they understand just how incredibly useful it can be.

Google has for its Pixels and some other phones an audio recorder that transcribes as you go. I've used it for some long material. It's not perfect, not by any means. It is suitable for finding a portion of a recording or a certain topic being talked about. And if you do need an exact transcript it's a good beginning that you can edit to closer to perfection.

And Microsoft Word for the Web in Office 365 now has dictation and transcription. So this is coming not only to smartphones but also to desktop computers.

This concept has been around for a long time with the Dragon Speak products but they were extra cost and when I first tried them 10-15 years ago not very useful. That is all changed. Dictation is now a very viable way of entering and large amounts of text and creating documents.

If you haven't tried it I encourage you to play with it and give it a shot.

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