Take a Note: Typing With No Hands

By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
WSJ

I am writing this paragraph on an iPhone. But I am not typing it on the phone's virtual keyboard. I am dictating it using a little-known feature that allows you to employ your voice instead of your fingers wherever text entry is possible on the device.

Many users of iPhones and Android phones are unaware that their phones come with dictation features. WSJ's Personal Technology Columnist Walt Mossberg tests out this little-used feature of smartphones and finds it works surprisingly well for composing hand-free text.

And now, for this paragraph, I have switched to an Android phone. Once again, I am composing these words using only my voice, and not typing them on the virtual keyboard.

Those two paragraphs, dictated as emails and then cut and pasted into this column on a computer, required far fewer corrections than you might think, given the bad reputation for accuracy that voice input on digital devices has acquired. I only had to add a comma I'd forgotten to specify in the first paragraph and capitalize the word "Android" in the second paragraph.

For me, a daily user of virtual keyboards, the process was quicker and more accurate than typing would likely have been, even for the relatively short blocks of text typically composed on phones.

(More here.)