“I bet he has a learning disability,” I said. I was reflecting on voice activation software recently, because I have a client - a university professor - who is working with a very bright PhD student who has a hard time expressing himself in writing. But the same process operates just as well for longer writing on your desktop or laptop computer. Likely, you may have already used such a feature on your cell phone to record texts or emails to family, friends and colleagues.

You speak and your computer records your words - not as an audio file - but as a text one. This process is called voice command or voice activation. I am writing this column by speaking it aloud to my computer. Now, however, you don’t need a secretary to be able to dictate. Do you want to speed up your writing process? Who doesn’t? That’s precisely why you should dictate rather than write with your hands…īack in the era of Mad Men, secretaries went into the offices of people like Don Draper (photo above) and took shorthand while he dictated.

Mac dictation software not dragon