A couple weeks ago, I accidentally blew away my entire computer. It wasn't my brightest moment, but thank goodness for online backup.

I was able to restore (most) of my data. The one thing I haven't been able to get working correctly since my reinstall is my word prediction program. Ordinarily, I don't use this very much as I normally rely on the speech recognition installed on my computer.

Its absence has caused one problem, however. When I'm listening to music and just talking to my friends, I prefer my earphones to my headset for audio quality. Without my word prediction program, I've been forced to resort to other means to listen to music and talk to my friends.

In the course of the past few days, I've discovered the dictation on the iPhone is good enough for Facebook conversations. However, my friends know me well enough to know that occasionally funny things are going to come up in the transcription.

Today, I'm taking things to the next level.

Over the next week (permanently if it works) I will be writing blog posts entirely from my iPhone. I will dictate, post as a draft and do any necessary minor editing on the computer before publishing.

My goal is to see just how long it takes me to write. If this goes well, I'm one step closer to really being able to file from the field. This device is capable of pictures, video and taking dictation.

Challenges

Nothing worth learning is without a challenge. I anticipate several with this endeavor.

There is no vocabulary training interface for the iPhone. This is one area where Dragon NaturallySpeaking on my laptop has Apple beat. I foresee having to hand type a lot of names.
Anyone who has used the built-in dictation engine on the iPhone for even something as simple as a text message knows that it does some funky things with capitalization if you try to edit mid sentence.
It has trouble with homonyms.

That said, I really wanted to give this a shot and see if it will work in an emergency situation. I want to be able to turn things around quicker than ever for The Oakland Post and future employers.

The preceding was dictated entirely on my iPhone.

writergraham.com