Speech to Text
I use the voice recognition built into Windows XP with very good results. Spend the money to get a good USB DSP headset. I bought the Planatronics xx-500 from Amazon for about $60 (it is about $130 retail) and have had very good accuracy. Plan to spend about 30 minutes training it for your voice. Integration into MS word is seamless.
--Joshua
There is a company that is call idictate.com -- they will transcribe for 1cent per word.
Here's an open source speech recognition package: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/sphinx4/
And, since it's open source, you could easily put together something to automatically transcribe your podcasts, if you wanted to do that (and if you know Java).
There are other versions available at http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.php.
Two of the best programs for a single user including multiple voices recording on the same PC:
1. Dragon Naturally Speaking
2. IBM Via Voice
They both take a bit of time to learn. Not only do you need to learn the program but it needs to learn to recognize your voice. Each time you correct a mis-interpreted word the system learns for the future.
They can learn to recognize multiple voices as well. They can translate real time or from a digital recording.
These do require a learning curve so if you are not using it a lot of times you may want to hire a dictation service.
