Rob Pegoraro

Monday, September 11, 2006; 8:08 AM

I gave my keyboard a rest this week but still wrote my usual quota of copy.

That turned out to be a lot more rewarding than I would have guessed at the start, given the iffy performance of many older dictation applications. I found that I could dictate copy with remarkable accuracy (or, at least, no worse damage than what I inflict with my keyboard typos).

 ition would work in his book "Second Foundation." In one chapter, 14-year-old student Arcadia Darell is speaking a term paper into a handheld device called a "Transcriber" and reads out a sentence:

"Through the science of psychohistory, the intrissacies of whose mathematics has long since been forgotten"

(She paused in a trifle of doubt. She was sure that 'intricacies' was pronounced with soft c's but the spelling didn't look right. Oh well, the machine couldn't very well be wrong)

I suppose that even thousands of years from now, auto-correct still won't be good enough to clean up after our own mistakes. Then again, Asimov describes this gadget as printing in only a single font -- "a charming and entirely feminine handwriting, with the most beautifully graceful capitals anyone ever saw" -- and we can already do much better than that. So perhaps there's still room for hope.

Read my review here: Speak and Spell, Slowly Growing Up.

BTW, if you've spent some quality time with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, MacSpeech's iListen or another voice-dictation program, I'd like to hear about how it's worked out for you over time. I haven't had the luxury of spending weeks or months tutoring any of these programs in the finer points of my speaking style, so I realize that I may be missing out on some of their potential. If you can, enlighten me: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Web Chat Today

I'll be online today at 2 p.m. ET for my biweekly Web chat. We can talk about Dragon NaturallySpeaking and any other personal tech question on your mind. Submit a question or comment here.

Is It Finally Time For Online Movie Downloads?

Amazon.com finally got into the video-download business Friday with Unbox, a Windows-only part of its Web site that lets you download TV shows and feature films.

Unbox doesn't beat anybody else on price. It charges the same $1.99 for a TV download as iTunes, while film pricing--for rental or for purchase--is pretty much all over the map. You might pay $7 and change for a flick, or you might get charged $15 or more; it's all up to the studio involved.

What Amazon does offer, however, is what's advertised as a DVD- quality download. That would be a major advance over the low- resolution quality of the movies sold and rented at the existing "big two" sites, CinemaNow and Movielink. (I must put that in quote, as neither service has gathered any sort of real audience.)

(Here's my most recent review of those two stores.)

And then there's Apple's announcement scheduled for tomorrow. The company e-mailed journalists one of its characteristically vague invitations, headlined just "It's Showtime." Well, gee, what could that possibly mean?!

I expect to hear that the iTunes Movie store will offer movie downloads of its own--as reported by Frank Ahrens last week--but I'm still not sure what quality we'll get. Nor do I know if we'll be able to burn these downloads to DVD, or if Apple will be like everybody else and expect us to plug an iPod or a laptop into the TV to watch anything on the big screen.

It would be nice to see some actual competition emerge in the market. But after this many years of bogus "we're finally getting serious about online sales" blather from the movie industry, I'm not going to get too optimistic beforehand.

Elsewhere in Sunday's Section

Check out these other personal-tech stories:

* In Web Watch, Frank Ahrens tries out AOL's StudyBuddy Web site, an attempt to create a Wikipedia alternative that students won't lose credit for citing in a term paper.

* Writer Chris Barylick describes a new program to ease the job of finding, subscribing and organizing the "RSS" newsfeeds offered by many sites these days.

* And in Help File, I explore the broadband options beyond cable or DSL and suggest a pair of programs that can automatically find and delete duplicate files on your computer.

	washingtonpost.com Video Mash-Up