I find one of the hardest parts of being creative, is getting the ideas down on paper; I have spoken of this before many times. And while I am an unashamed fan of gathering my thoughts using Microsoft Word’s (or any other WP [package for that matter as this principle is the same) Outlining feature sometimes – no often – the thoughts tend to tumble out at a huge range of knots and cannot be broken down into logical headings at the time.

Using a voice recorder is one way, and for this purpose, I, and many of my peers have settled on the beautiful Zoom H2 as the little beast to go for. Whack a 512MB SD card in there, and you have voluminous amounts of space to record to. Battery life can be a little whacky, and you have to be careful what settings you use for maximum recording time, but anyone worth their salt will carry a spare set of batteries and a second SD card just in case.

However, I find reviewing via audio is difficult, and therefore use mine for 99% recording interviews – any important thought that comes while driving etc is taken care of by the Audio Note Taker on my Motorola RAZR 9 (as against going into battle with scantily clad bits o’ crumpet at a railway station for example. Not my choice I assure you ...)

Like many, in the past I have dabbled in voice recognition / translation – as far back as 1994 as I recall. Early programs from Creative Labs explored the process of computer control, and then Dragon came on the scene with their Naturally Speaking application.

And like many, I gave up in frustration, usually 2 hours into the training process each time a new version came out.

Last week I received a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) 9 for Vista (10 is imminent I understand) complete with a natty wireless Plantronics headset, and bugger me, the first attempt at training, taking oh, 10 minutes, just worked! 100% straight out of the box. The application then went away, studied my Word and Outlook folders to decipher my writing style (clever move that!) and came back ready to be fine tuned.

That’s tonight’s job.

So far, I am impressed. I have had mental images of walking around a room dictating and commanding – “Computer – open AusCam database” a la Cap’n Kirk – for ages. Maybe, just maybe it’s about to come true. At last.

I’ll keep you posted.