Tell me about your experiences using some kind of voice-to-recognition.
I spend all day writing professionaly in front of a computer, so when I go home and work on my personal writing, I’d rather just speak out loud – like I was telling a story to someone instead of typing it out or writing longhand. I’m also really interested to see if the “storyteller” me is as good or better than the “writer” me.
I don’t even know what I need. Software? A mic? That sounds right. Can I do it cheap?
Software and a mic, yep. The main player in this market is Dragon Dictate by Nuance. It works very well, but you will need to proofread. I had a professor in college (five or six years ago) who had wrist problems and used dictation software exclusively. Definitely errors in his handouts, but he certainly got by and it was probably 95%+ accurate.
The software will run you ~$100, but you can find it on sale at times if you poke around.
Depending on how you want to use it, a digital Dictaphone-style recorder might be your next desire, but prices aren’t cheap on the decent ones.
If you record yourself on tape and send it to me, I’ll transcribe it for you and gaurantee 100% accuracy for let’s say… 0.6 cents per word.
I appreciate the offer, and if I decide to write novel using the tape-recording method, I will keep you in mind! But for now, I’d like to keep these ramblings in-house.
Also, and OMG I can’t resist, you misspelled “guarantee.” 
If you have Windows 7, it has built-in voice recognition software, although I think Dragon NaturallySpeaking is more powerful. You really need a headset to make it work and plan on devoting hours to “train” it to your voice. I don’t use it for day-to-day text entry, but when I have a lot to write, I’ll use it.
I have Dragon and it’s horrible. It’s only marginally better than Win7 voice recognition. I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent trying to “train” the software and I still get less than 50% results. It’s a lot quicker to type it.
It would be better to tell your story to a recorder and than type it up in your day off
That’s the tool the school district has suggested we get for Dweezil (and they make it available at school also). Dweezil has zero interest in it, however.
Well, gracious me. I just had Windows 7 installed on my work computer and it does indeed have software recognition. Thanks for the tips, gaffa and all. I’ll see if Windows works for my needs.
If you are getting results that poor, there is something wrong with your computer setup. Repeat the installation, paying very close attention to the microphone setup. The main thing is that a lot of computers have noisy microphone inputs at too low a volume. When it prompts you to play back your speech, note how noisy or clean the recording is, and how much you have to boost the volume of your speakers. Either that, or you are trying to use a non-headset microphone, or are in a very noisy environment. Because I can take a standard cheap headset and a fresh copy of NaturallySpeaking and within an hour be dictating at 95% accuracy or better.
I’ll second this. 15 years ago I knew a programmer with incredibly bad carpal tunnel and she used DragonDictate for all of her work. It worked great for her; I wouldn’t say it was as fast as typing, but I’d say it was 90% as fast. And that was 15 years ago - the technology is much better now.