Some of my best work is “;done”; while I'm driving or just about to fall sleep. That's when the copy blocks for building stories come to mind, and I try to write them down in long hand or risk forgetting them until I do have that opportunity. Whole stories have come to me this way, and I've always thought it would be great if I could only think it, and the work would be done.

After a friend from Japan turned me on to Dragon Dictation, I had to tell everyone. A lot of apps tend to be time wasters, but this is a genuine time saver. For me, this app for the iPhone has been a life changer, converting my voiced ramblings into text, the start of a story or blog post that I can then e-mail to myself to work on and edit later. My restaurant review, three blog posts last week, as well as this piece, started with Dragon Dictation.

Others may want to use it to send a quick tweet, though honestly, how hard is it to type 140 characters?

I can think of sentences faster than I can write or type and Dragon Dictation saves me the time and energy of redundant gestures. Its programmers claim that the dictation/conversion process is five times faster than typing.

Of course, it's not perfect. First, I tend to mumble and perfect enunciation is critical for accuracy. For instance, the line I spoke, “;e-mail back to me”; came out “;e-mail my butt back to me,”; and “;just about to sleep”; read as “;justify policy,”; but it is accurate enough for my needs.

When I posted it to Twitter, someone asked if it could do Hawaiian and local names. I didn't think so, but when I spoke about the recent Taste of Marukai event, it did translate it as “;Taste of Molokai.”;

The words I send back to myself tend to be a jumble of circular thoughts, but that's where editing comes in. You'll also have to add in all the punctuation. If you speak too long, the process of converting your words to text may time out, but the app has picked up as many as three paragraphs of ramblings at once.

There is a keypad function that allows you to clean up copy as you go. Use it, because some translations can be doozies, and when you finally have time to clean up your text, you may have forgotten what you really wanted to say.

Now, if only I could redirect my time savings into my personal life instead of adding to my workload.

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