So unlike probably most of the people on this forum, I have a vastly easier time making mouthnoises than typing or writing things out, at least in a formal/presentation context. (we're talking like public speaking being 2 to 3 orders of magnitude easier than writing an equivalent essay) I am also about to start work on a major research paper thing (undergraduate thesis prep, basically). So. uh. See thread title.
Dragon Naturally Speaking is the best I've heard of, though it takes training it to recognize your voice. I've used the native voice recognition in Macs, and it's terrible. Training it might help, but idk, and don't want to work on it - and I have a fairly neutral accent, CBC + American Midwest + speech therapy when I was a kid, so theoretically I should be easy for software to recognize. I use Siri for short things and it tends to be more or less on point. Dragon Naturally Speaking is what most people I know use, though, though it's expensive.
I was also coming here to suggest Dragon - it's not perfect, but it's not bad. It had a hard time with the person I know who used it, but he had quite a bit of an accent, which didn't help. But yeah, monies.
On Windows, the built in software is actually useful (under accessibility options). Dragon works pretty good and accent doesn't matter a lot if you are training for a single voice. It sucks for "general voices" - it's worse than Windows by default. VoiceNote II for Google Chrome is ... meh. Useful, not admirable. Dictation.io is useful. (web) TalkTyper (web)
