I think I’m going to start dictating my articles. It’s not that I couldn’t before. It’s just that now, with Dragon’s new ‘Dictation’ app available here on the app store, it’s easier than ever. Even better, it’s free.

Whether you’re a highly experienced computer-based dictator, or just someone who’s giving it a try for the first time, Dictator makes adapting to this big change in technology very simple.

At the bottom you’ll find three buttons: a button to type in details, a button to record (or dictate), and a button allowing you to send your text by e-mail, text message, or simply add it to the clipboard for later use.

For years I considered giving another dictation application a try.  However, cost and past experiences caused me to shun it like an ’80s era American-made diesel automobile. Now I regret that decision in retrospect.

Voice recognition has come along way, of course. I remember trying to use a clunky dictation application under Windows NT in the early 1990s. As much as I tried to get it to understand my voice, it never really seemed to work very well. I worked, and worked, and worked, but it didn’t seem to ever really get trained to my voice. (That’s what we had to do back then to get dictation to be even half as effective as this thing is out of the box.)

If you’ve ever used one of these applications in the past, trust me you will have a much easier time with Dictator. For example, all the proper words above including the phrase ’1990s’ were perfectly typed when I dictated to this application.

Try it for yourself.  Again, the application is absolutely free and available immediately.

Good luck and happy dictating.

UPDATE (20091211): David Pogue discusses Dragon Dictator in more detail here.

Along with today’s Wall Street Journal article, several outlets are reporting the integration of Lala and its technologies into Apple’s iTunes ecosystem as some revolutionary thing, even going so far as to say this will be the complete rethinking of iTunes.

Not necessarily likely.  As early as two years ago rumors swirled that iTunes – or at least the music component – would be integrated into the MobileMe technology base, which to most of us means one word: sync.  Not the sync you think of when your files are being backed up, byte by byte, to the great cloud in the sky.  We’re talking the kind of sync that you used to find in the early days of MP3.com: look at my hard drive, find my songs, and use an algorithm to decide if I ‘own’ the songs I want be able to stream from a master of each located on the provider’s servers in the sky.  In and of itself, not much different from Lala’s current streaming technology but perhaps a little less of a headache.

Certainly Apple considered this model because it meant locking newly acquired music subscriptions into existing MobileMe features (and pricing) while making even more attractive the MM’s core services for existing users.  But for one reason or another (one might guess a lack of developed backend infrastructure or perhaps an indication that they needed to wrench a few more dollars out of the purchase model), Apple opted to wait.

What most of us already knew was MobileMe sync was still rather broken, and iPhone initial release or two confirmed this.  Eddy Cue managed the clean up this mess and now we have a very tight, quick sync service.  What we also new was the iPhone and iPod touch craze hadn’t transformed a large base of consumers into a group of MobileMe prospects.

But now?  Sounds like a great time to extend the any device sync strategy to music.  Think ‘iTunes Home Directory’ when you consider where this is headed – at least for now.

So we’ll almost certainly see something that looks like Lala’s web accessible personal music collection but with a twist: Apple doesn’t enjoy losing money and Lala was hemorrhaging with its cheap web streaming option despite selling downloadable music as well.  With Apple music downloads will continue, the web service will be integrated, but the same engine driving iTunes’ Pandora-like Genius system will be extended to accommodate song fingerprinting to enable iTunes web to authorize playback of everything you bought through iTS, Amazon, or acquired anywhere else and threw into your collection.

The cloud’s cool, there’s no doubt we’re eventually sending just about everything up there in some form, but no reason for all this talk about the music industry changing again overnight.  As the leader of the pack, Apple has no need to spin the model on its head.  But they do have the drive and the DNA to make enjoying your music even easier than before.