Your phone wants to hear from you

Signing on to Facebook.

I interview a lot of people on the phone. I record the interview on a digital recorder placed next to my phone, which is on speaker. I then have to listen to the recording and transcribe it.

I could probably find a more difficult way to do this if I put my mind to it.

So I perked up when I saw a piece by Walt Mossberg, the ever-astute technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Both Apple and Android phones allow you to dictate things to them. Whenever you see the microphone icon, just click it and start talking.

I tried it out on my Motorola Droid X. It wouldn't let me dictate email, but it did let me dictate a Word document in Quick Office. Pretty cool. Then I found and downloaded Google Voice Search, which allows me to dictate emails.

Now maybe I could do that before. I don't know. I'm fairly certain I'm the last person on the planet to catch on to this stuff.

Back to Mossberg.

On both leading smartphone platforms, I found that relatively short dictation—such as emails, texts, tweets, Facebook posts and notes—was at least as accurate, and often more, as typing on a glass screen. It was better in quiet environments, but did OK even in most noisy places like grocery stores, coffee shops and carwashes. It was also faster, since, as long as you don't have to correct numerous errors, speaking is usually faster than typing on glass.

While the microphone keys work a bit differently on the two platforms, they are basically similar. When the keyboard appears, ready for you to type, you can instead hit the microphone key and simply dictate what you want to say. The phones then send your spoken words to a remote server, which rapidly translates them into text and sends them back to the phone's screen. If corrections are needed, you make them by typing, though both platforms make this easier by indicating the likeliest errors, and suggesting alternatives.

I found that both platforms' dictation systems worked well enough for me to recommend them Mossberg concludes. In case after case, both phones got it right, or close enough to require little correcting.