Over the past few years I’ve dabbled with dictating parts of a story, usually with varying degrees of success. I’ve been nowhere near as productive with it as Kevin J. Anderson, who has used dictation to write his novels for many years. He even wrote a book about it On Being a Dictator – WordFire Shop

Part of the challenge, as Kevin discusses in the book is that it takes time to become comfortable with the process. The last time I tried dictating was about two years ago. I began to make some good progress then hit the challenge of having to transcribe several hundred words of audio. I found myself spending as much time, or more, transcribing as I was writing new words. Not an ideal solution and not long after that I put the recorder away to gather dust.

This past week or so, the idea of dictation nudged at my mind. I still had the same concern of transcribing several hundred words but now the text to speech capabilities have improved dramatically that I figured it was worth another try.

Typically, the first challenge was the recorder. I know it’s somewhere but not anywhere I can find it, despite turning my office upside down twice and scouring through my car, which is where the recorder was usually left.

Still no luck, so I turned to my trusty friend Amazon. The digital recorder options there range from $30.00 to $300.00, with an interesting discovery that most of them include a speech to text capability. I hesitated on the Buy button because you can guarantee that the morning the new recorder arrives, I’ll find the old one!

Instead, I had a quick look at the Voice Memo app on my iphone – recordings only limited by the space left on your iphone, and wait – what’s this? speech to text translation. I took it for a quick test drive and the translation was acceptable. Syncing of the audio was easy – right there into iCloud. The transcription was a little more involved as you have to copy the transcript into a Files folder that’s connected to iCloud – not the end of the world, but not as easy as sharing via AirDrop – maybe in the next iteration.

I’m about half way through a short story, and as I have the rest of it pretty clear in my mind, I’m going to see how dictation works for the next 1,500 to 2,000 words.

Stay tuned.