Walter,

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

FWIW: for a long time, professionals had secretaries who used shorthand to record voice and convert it into typed documents. It worked well, but required highly skilled secretaries. More recently, portable recorder technology allowed professionals to do the same for remote transcriptionists. Shorthand vanished almost completely with transcription increasingly commoditized into typing pools. The digital age allowed those transcriptionists to be "lowest cost" providers in the third world.

I think it is hubris to believe that technology cannot replicate the task of converting speech into text with appropriate punctuation and emphasis. Most of us can speak more quickly than we type and in highly resourced professions like healthcare, physicians prefer dictation wherever it is available. Make it more available and the preference will spread like wildfire. At which point much of the IT stuff that gets people all worked up today, will be like argument over which version of shorthand is the best. IMHO ;-)


Regards

j.R