So what in the world do today's tech tools have to do with discipleship? In my humble opinion, the answer is "a lot." I feel that we have an obligation to perform the tasks involved in our various discipleship roles in as productive and effective a manner as we can. Tech tools can help us do that. Many of us struggle to free enough time from our work and family responsibilities to even begin to fulfill our roles as disciples. Tech tools, for those of us who are comfortable with learning and using them, and for those who are willing to try, can bring substantial improvements in our ability to maximize discipleship time.

In this series of articles, I will share a few of the tech tools which have become quite useful in improving my own personal productivity. Although I have spent more years than I care to remember as a software engineer, I have reached a point in life where, outside of certain tools required for work, I have no interest whatever in tools which are complicated to learn and use, or which tend to break or to encounter security problems, or which are expensive. The tools I will discuss may be rather surprising to you in each of these respects.

I will begin this week with my favorite tech tool, and the one which has, for me, provided the most dramatic boost in productivity. In fact, I consider it to be the best-kept secret in the world of technology. That tool is dictation software.

In the course of carrying out the responsibilities for my job, my church role, and my family life, I have to churn out lots and lots of words. In addition, my favorite hobby is writing, which adds to the ongoing word count. So I have come to use dictation software heavily in each of these areas. In fact, I'm using it to write this article.

Dictation software has been available on personal computers since back in the 1990s. The unfortunate truth is that it really didn't work all that well back then. The software itself hadn't become particularly good yet, and the computers of that era simply weren't powerful enough to handle a resource-intensive task such as dictation. Yet at times, its contribution to productivity came tantalizingly close to being positive, and many of us persisted in struggling with it before giving up.

This led to a perception, which is around to this day, that dictation software simply doesn't work all that well. But guess what? Several years ago, continual improvements pushed the software itself to the point that it became pretty darn good, and it kept getting better all the time. Personal computers became massively more powerful than they had been a decade earlier. And suddenly I found dictation software to be working much more effectively, and boosting my word-producing productivity to a much higher level, than I had ever dreamt.

So how good is it? Studies have shown that most people can dictate about three to four times faster than they can type. That number corresponds more or less to my own impression. An even bigger surprise, perhaps, has been that it takes far less energy to dictate a document than it does to type it. And there is certainly no worry about damaging your hands, wrists, or arms.

The accuracy levels of today's dictation software are said to be at around 99 percent, and that is probably correct. You'll still need to proofread your output, of course. You won't find any misspellings, but you will find instances in which a similar-sounding word has been substituted for the word you actually intended to say, such as "their" instead of "there." You should plan to spend some up-front time in "training" the software to respond accurately to your own particular voice. And you should plan to speak more distinctly than might be the case in ordinary conversation.

The dictation software which I use is called Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Prices start at around $80. You'll need to have a computer with a reasonable amount of memory and speed, which would include most of the personal computers being sold today. The software comes with a microphone and headset suitable for dictation. You can buy the software directly from its producer, at shop.nuance.com/store/nuanceus/Content/pbPage.dns-page1.

My favorite dictation story occurred back in the 1990s, when the software often struggled to differentiate a voice from external noises. Back then, I was writing a monthly column for the Business Journal. I was dictating the column one night, when my dog, Lucy, decided to make me aware of her presence. As she often enjoyed doing, she slipped up behind me and barked her distinctive bark. As usual, I rose a couple of feet from my chair. But when I looked down at the computer screen, I saw that the software had interpreted Lucy's bark as three or four words at the beginning of the paragraph. It occurred to me that I could shape a meaningful sentence which began with those words, so I left them intact and continued writing. Afterward, I enjoyed telling people that my column for that month had been cowritten by my Lhasa apso.