[NicknamedBob]

There's an incredible amount of mental computation that goes on in translating speech to text. I was quite astonished at the skill demonstrated by a secretary I used to work with when she invited me to dictate a letter directly to her while she typed it out on her typewriter.

"Recent research has shown that students taking notes on a computer retain significantly less information and have worse comprehension than those who take notes by hand (either print or cursive)."

I noted the same finding in my research prior to posting my comments about cursive writing. It was found that writing in cursive allowed better retention of notated information than directly typing it into a database of some kind.

This would indicate that there is a heirarchy of task-performance operating here; one can be busy translating information from one form to another, or one can be busy trying to record information being presented verbally, but it is difficult to do both at the same time.

[Tax-chick]

That makes sense. A problem with typing directly from speech is that you don’t know where a sentence is going until it gets there, so it’s extremely difficult to punctuate on the fly.