This post was last updated on March 6, 2026
Added March 6, 2026: And now voice recognition is everywhere. I first used Dragon Naturally Speaking at version 2.0 I think. I’ve never been great at typing, and in the second half of the 1990s this seemed like magic. But you were also dealing with 90s computing power. Dragon worked, but the amount of training you had to do for the computer to recognize your words reliably was intense. It took hours of time and lots of repetition to get to a good reliability rate.
In 2011, when I tried Dragon on the iPad, word recognition was much improved and an amazing leap from 15 years earlier. Now we’re 15 years past that. Looking back on 30 years of progress in natural language processing reminds me how fast technology progresses. Let’s not even talk about the difference between an Atari 2600 and PlayStation 5.
I haven’t posted anything in a long time just because I haven’t really had the time. But I got an iPad from work to test out and I decided to test out dictation software. I thought the best place to try that was on my blog so we’ll see how it works. Maybe I’ll post more often. I’m still amazed that Dragon software for the iPad is free. The app is very limited compared to what the full software on the Mac or PC would be but when all you really want to do is get some text into a computer this is a great way to do it.