I got my first usable smartphone 15 months ago, one of the those Samsung Notes with the huge screens for my presbyopic eyes and maladroit fingers. Back then I hoped it would have speech recognition so I could make notes for upcoming blog posts and articles as thoughts occurred to me while walking.

A typical 1300 word Taki’s column usually starts off as a page of notes: about three dozen randomly ordered sentence fragments.

I think better walking, but I have to stop walking to type on my phone, and I’m slow at typing on a screen, so I usually don’t.

But my dictation test in late 2013 came up with enough gibberish that I decided it wasn’t useful.

At some point, however, the Android operating system (or whatever) upgraded itself, so that in 2015 the dictation to text messaging is strikingly accurate. For example, my phone just now accurately transcribed me saying the not exactly common phrase “victimism Pokemon points.”

Bizarrely, speech recognition might be more accurate today than typing because the system turns off the annoying auto-correct spellchecker for dictation but not for typing. As a test, I just now tried to type in “victimism” and the spellchecker changed it to “victims.”

I doubt, however, if speech recognition works well enough yet for sending texts to people other than yourself. I generally recognize the gist of what I was trying to say, but I can’t expect other people to be that understanding.