Keyboards, Speech Recognition or...?

On the one hand there is a bewildering array of tools, gadgets, reference bases, etc. at our disposal as we work on the computer and the Internet. On the other hand, when it comes to actually entering our deathless prose, it comes down to a choice between the keyboard and a voice or speech recognition application.
Where the latter is concerned, you speak into a microphone and the software transfers your words into written text. There are several products available in this field, the most popular probably being Dragon Naturally Speaking
I tried out a similar product a few years ago and even then was impressed by the results (no doubt performance has got even better since then). I found that the software really did transcribe what I said very well. But I eventually decided that speech recognition, whatever its virtues, was not for me. Why?
First, and at the most general level, I suppose it's because you need a very compelling reason to abandon a tried and trusted method in favour of an approach which gives no noticeable gain in productivity - quite the contrary in my case. I accept that it takes time to incorporate any new way of working and that it is all too easy to forsake something without giving it a fair trial, but I concluded that speech recognition, notwithstanding its very real merits, was not suited to my particular work environment.
Second, the adoption of speech recognition means turning your back on so many of the possibilities offered by word processors for easing the writing process. The actual inputting of text is only half the battle; you will also want to tinker with the appearance and layout of your document, change its style, copy and paste, etc. No doubt speech recognition can handle some of these features but, it seems to me, in a very cumbersome way. And then there all those "tricks of the trade", tools and utilities, not to mention the vast resources of the Internet for which speech recognition is, in my opinion, peculiarly ill-suited.
The third and, for me, most compelling reason for not using speech recognition is to do with my profession as a translator. Translators are forever rephrasing, reformulating, correcting and modifying what they write. It's a constant case of stop and start, stop and start, far removed from the continuous flow which speech recognition requires for best results. And that's before we even get to the problem of all those foreign words, phrases, acronyms, etc. we need to integrate in our text!

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that speech recognition cannot be a perfectly viable alternative for many people - doctors and lawyers, for example - and in many circumstances where, for one reason or another, the keyboard may not be the best option. And there are no doubt ways of combining the best of both worlds.

So, for this blogger at any rate, the keyboard wins hands down! But is that the end of the story? Not quite!

The title of this post hinted at the possibility of another alternative. A new company called Livescribe is bringing out its Smartpen this fall and if the advance hype is anything to go by, it could well encourage a lot of people to go back to the good old pen and paper. Have a look at what the company has to say about the Smartpen here
I personally am very excited about it!