Do you remember, back in the days before computers and any kind of automation, managers used to say to their secretaries ‘take a letter Miss Dilger’?

How times have changed. Now we do our own letters and our secretaries are personal assistants helping us with our own productivity.

I was reminded of this recently when I downloaded the latest Macintosh operating system for my laptop. Usually, I ignore these downloads and proceed with my daily work in the normal way. They don’t affect me. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when the latest release of the operating system downloaded some dictation software for my machine. I had to have a play immediately.

As you probably know, dictation software has been around for quite some time, but it has been notoriously unreliable. Either it completely misunderstood the dictated words or needed a vast amounts of corrections afterwards. Well, I have to say that the current dictation software which I am using to create this blog post is nothing short of a revelation. It is unbelievably accurate, easy to use and time saving. It has probably saved me half the time it normally takes to create a blog post. A couple of changes are all I need to make before I publish the post. In fact, the only mistake it really made was to spell my surname Dillinger and that really is no bad thing.

It is a strange feeling when the creative process becomes one of dictating verbally rather than imagining in your head and then typing in your computer. It reminds me of the differences between spoken language and written language. That said, however, to say that this is a somewhat seismic day for me as a writer and blogger is possibly the understatement of the year. Full stop.