Back at the dictation shoppe.

I got tired of the speech recognition errors I was getting in Word on my phone so I’ve been checking out some alternatives. The market for Ai powered speech recognition has assploded bigly, as you’d imagine, but that just means there’s a lot of garbage apps out there.

Annoyingly, Word’s desktop dictation performance remains pretty good, since it’s powered by the Nuance engine, but I like to walk around my office talking to my phone, which is 7 years old. I suspect its struggling to keep up.

I’ll swap it for a new model at Xmas, but I have a couple of manuscripts to finish before then so I really want an alternative.

I’m trying out Otter and will have a look at something called Mac Whisper tomorrow.

But it’s making me nostalgic for Dragon Dictate 5, a ten-year-old version of the OG dictator that was as good as non LLM speech recognition got.