If you do a lot of writing, you might prefer to dictate your first drafts. If so, read here about Speechnotes: an excellent, free dictation app.
A while ago a friend introducted me to Dragon, Naturally Speaking, an amazingly accurate offline dictation app that one installs on one’s own computer. “The Dragon” really is great, but since then I bought a chromebook, a small, light, and inexpensive computer that runs nothing more than a browser for an operating system. Most applications on a chromebook are accessed from a Google server (in “the cloud”), so a rather code-heavy app that one installs on one’s own computer, like Dragon Naturally Speaking, wouldn’t run on my chromebook.
Chromebook in hand, I went looking for an online dictation app, and I found a five-star one, called Speechnotes. I discovered that Speechnotes is free, and can be used by anyone, no matter what device you use.
Speechnotes is accessed by opening a Chromium web browser –(If you don’t have the Chromium browser installed, go here to download it: https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/desktop/)– and then visit the following address: https://speechnotes.co/
Speechnotes is really easy to use, and I found that I didn’t need to train it to my voice, which is the case with Dragon Naturally Speaking. Just visit the page above, make sure your own computer microphone is on, then click the red icon of the microphone at the top right of the page and begin speaking. You will be amazed to see your spoken words appear in print very quickly. If you want to pause, just click the microphone icon again, then click it again to resume. You can edit the dictated words with your keyboard (in case there are mistakes) anytime you wish. When you are finished dictating look to the left of the page where you will find several links for saving the dictation as a .txt file, or emailing it, or uploading it to your Google drive. If you use Gmail and the mail-to link in Speechnotes doesn’t work, here is the fix: See “making Gmail your default client in Chrome”: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/set-gmail-as-browser-default-email-client-ht
On the Speechnotes home page, at the right bottom is a link to “About & More”. You might want to read that, where the authors concede that Dragon Naturally Speaking can do much more. However, Speechnotes is very accurate, and FREE. I find that hard to beat!