It is said that idiots are easily amused. By that criterion I am one. I am easily amused by the degree to which speech recognition software has improved from my college days 47 years ago to the present. It still has a few problems even today, but I am managing to write this post using the Google speech to text software built-in to this phone.
And that pleases me more than you can imagine, or at least more than words can express. I am having fun with a technology for the first time in years!
ANNOTATION from the desktop's keyboard: my dictation was halting, as you might expect of someone who is not by training or nature a dictator. But there were only two errors I could not easily correct by speaking rather than typing: one was the sentence "I am one"; the s/w was absolutely determined to change the "one" to the digit "1" no matter what I did. One time it even visibly transcribed it as "one" and then visibly changed it to "1". (sigh!) The other had to do with inserting explicit newlines. The s/w recognizes some punctuation and a few formatting characters when their names are spoken, and "newline" is one of them, but something about my Texas accent must have thrown off the recognition algorithm: sometimes it inserted a Unicode/ASCII newline character; sometimes it rendered it "Near line" or something even more unrecognizable. Even so, there were no more transcription errors than I learned to expect from the cheeky and uncooperative keypunch operator in my first job right out of college. (sigh again!)
