Sony ICD-MS515

Automatic transcription? We don't think so

Anything that promises to do away with hours of tedious toil is guaranteed to spark our interest, and this double act of voice recorder and speech-recognition software certainly seemed to fit the bill. The recorder itself is easy enough to use, thanks to its sensible allocation of buttons and logical menu system.

The bit we were really excited about, however, was how the device works in conjunction with the Dragon Naturally Speaking voice-recognition app. Can you really just leave the program to transcribe your recordings for you? Well, no is the simple answer. After spending over 30 minutes training the software, the results were, fairly unsurprisingly, just incoherent gibberish. We expect you'd get similar results if you simply employed a bunch of ham-fisted monkeys to bash away at a keyboard for hours on end. It'd certainly be more entertaining.
Niall Magennis