Part of my journalistic work involves transcribing tapes of interviews I've conducted. It hate it--it's laborious, boring, and incredibly time consuming. With all the necessary stops and starts, each tape takes at least twice as long to transcribe and it would to simply listen to. My fantasy is that someone will develop an artificial-intelligence program that converts spoken words into type--sort of like a voice-recognition program but advanced enough to recognize anyone's voice. I have a feeling that technology is a long way off, though--some of the people I interview speak so softly or mumble so much that even I can barely make out what they're saying.