Your post sounds like the anxious confused ramblings of a prisoner in a grocery store after years of choosing between the slop or the gruel at the mess hall. Hang in there, being an empowered consumer is a little scary at first.

The Brooklyn man was quoted as saying "it all started as a way to find out if there was really any place at all where I could get good reception on the iphone". When the phone landed there were 7 voicemail messages, 13 text messages, and 16 emails that were all sent several days prior but had managed to download at about 5 vertical miles.

this smells more like an add than an article.

you are clearly not an AT&T customer.

Go in a dark room, aim a bright flashlight at a ceiling, and see what happens.

Thanks a lot you insensitive clod - I did that and the bat living up there came down and bit me.

wow. simulated road rage.

i had a bad feeling when i read the summary, but when I saw the picture of the thing it became very clear what is going to happen. I've seen enough sci-fi to know that thing is definitely going to turn on the crew when it gets up there. It will probably sample everyone's voices and for years it will provide radio communication and no one will realize that astronaut and cosmonaut corpses are circling the earth. Then it will watch from above as it figures out ways to manipulate government intelligence and pits America against the former USSR until both countries are annihilated.

exactly. I would use data much more often on my iphone if it actually worked anywhere. instead I find myself looking over the shoulders of my colleagues surfing the net at conferences on their verizon droids while my iphone sits there looking at me reading 'no signal'.

wow, shame on the anonymous troll that posted this and the moderators that must have been teleported from the early 90s. The high-end transcription packages are truly incredible. Yes, you need to spend some time training them to your speech patterns and accent, and yes it makes a big difference if you use a quality microphone (not the one that's built into your laptop or iphone) at a fixed distance. With a decent setup transcription software can be really impressive at high speeds and with complicated vocabulary - talk to a doctor in a large modern hospital - many are trusting these systems with their patients medical record information, and these guys have high expectations when it comes to transcriptions because they are used to having very skilled ears listen to them mumbling jargon quickly for their transcriptions.

Having anything but a really good setup can be really frustrating though - maybe slashdot tinkerers have dabbeled and written these kinds of apps off. I do imagine that it wouldn't be worthwhile using anything but the top dictation apps if you want to avoid any serious post-editing.