A few years ago, I bought an Olympus digital voice recorder. It could retain several hours of voice recordings and had a USB connector.The software was Via Voice. In theory, you use a microphone to teach the software to understand your voice by reading. Then you could just talk into your voice recorder, making a series of individual recordings. Then you'd use the USB connector between your computer and portable recorder and it would take each file and put them into written form.

It was a nice idea, but it didn't work very well. If you buy stuff at Circuit City, for example, you can get a full refund if it doesn't work correctly for you. I was just very curious about this and bought a "refurbished unit" on Ebay so I couldn't get a refund.

Maybe there are better setups now.

Dragon speaking is what a lot of medical doctors use to dictate clinic notes.

A gig of memory sounds about right, at least. Dragon and even Via Voice run in the background and use a lot of memory, even when not being used, though maybe the newer version will allow you to only have it active when you want it active.