I’ve just ordered Dragon Naturally Speaking – Preferred, the best speech recognition program around. I’m not filing this under “Play money”–I’m filing this under “Investment”, and I’m looking forward to wringing as much value out of it as I can. It will be worth it.

I’m planning to use it for braindumping my thoughts. I want to be able to _talk_ this blog post out, and in the process, practice talking in a semi-organized manner. I want to be able to talk my book out as well as write it out, depending on how I feel at the time.

I want to read to it. While I’m reading a book, I’d like to be able to say, “Oooh, page 87, Live and preach the culture, or it just won’t happen.” (This is from Saving Big Blue.) And the cool thing about the preferred version (and the professional version, which at $799 is out my current first-time-personal-investment budget) is that I can get it to transcribe recordings from a digital recorder that I bought some time ago. That would make it even easier to grab snippets of ideas and put them into my book notes system, maybe even my blog. Mwahahaha!

And if I’m _really_ lucky, I may even get it to transcribe other people’s podcasts. Wouldn’t that be nifty?

I’m excited. Looking forward to getting it after this bunch of holidays… =)