Speech-to-text...just a novelty?

Does anyone else believe that the speech-to-text feature is essentially unusable? I've been playing around with it, and while it's fun to use, in practical terms, it has little value. When I dictate something, the errors are so egregious that I spend far more effort with corrections.
I can see making something, such as a grocery list, where mistakes don't matter, but for a serious document it's unreliable.

Does it 'learn' your speech patterns over time and become more usable?

What are you using and yes with frequent use it gets very good. Back in my college days, nearly 15 years ago, I used an earlier version of Dragon to dictate all of my essays. I later edited it for style and so on, it was easier to just speak my stream of thought and format later.

The first few times it was pretty bad, but by the 4th or 5th essay, it had gotten pretty good. By the time I finished college, it was just awesome..

Secondly, for accessibility reasons, speech-to-text is very useful! While an able bodied person might think of it as a novelty, there are those that can only rely it to communicate..

My friend had developed carpal tunnel during his college years and used Dragon for all of his medical writing. It took a whole to teach it all the words, but it learned.

I don't suffer from Carpal Tunnel at all, but I use the dictation feature to handle all my email now. I type very quickly so I don't have to use dictation on the Mac all that much but on the iPad, it has completely changed how I handle messaging and email. I don't have serious issues with corrections, but I've learned to speak clearly and evenly and remember to say the punctuation.

Raz0rEdge said:

Secondly, for accessibility reasons, speech-to-text is very useful! While an able bodied person might think of it as a novelty, there are those that can only rely it to communicate..

Click to expand...

The educator in me wanted to point this out as well. Software that acts as a bridge between the written word and the spoken word (both ways) has tremendous potential and utility in assisting those with exceptionalities. While no software will ever be perfect, it does make the process of communicating ideas on a computer considerably easier for a not insignificant part of the population.

I use it when I need to quickly send a text message and my hands are not free. IE driving etc.

Another place that speech to text is really great is with translations. Putting my Star Trek cap on for a second, imagine a an universal translator that takes speech in one language and translates it into another, so it's speech to text and back to speech or just text for reading..

Something like that is hardly a novelty..

When had a shoulder reconstruction and unable to type found Dragon the bees knees. It was recommended to me in the forums here.