1. A hand held computing device for performing large vocabulary speech recognition comprising: one or more processing devices; one or more memory devices readable by the processing devices; a microphone or audio input for providing an electronic signal representing a sound input; a speaker or audio output for enabling an electronic representation of sound produced in said device to be transduced into a corresponding sound; programming recorded in one or more of the memory devices including: speech recognition programming for performing large vocabulary speech recognition that responds to the electronic representations of the sound of a sequence of one or more utterances received from the microphone or audio input by producing a text output corresponding to the one or more words recognized as corresponding to the utterances; and audio recording programming for recording an electronically readable representation of said sound in one or more of said memory devices; and audio playback programming for playing back said recorded sound representation and providing a corresponding audio signal to said speaker or audio output; wherein the device's programming has instructions for enabling a user to select between the following three possible modes of recording sound input as it is received: a first mode that places text output in response to speech recognition of said sound input into a user navigable document at a current cursor location, without a representation of a recording of said sound input; a second mode that places a representation of a recording of said sound input into said user navigable document at said cursor without text responding to speech recognition of said sound input; and a third mode that places text output in response to speech recognition of said sound input into the user navigable document at the current cursor location, with the words of the text output themselves representing the portions a recording of the sound input from which each such word has been recognized; and wherein the audio playback programming includes instructions for enabling a user to select to play recorded sound represented by the sound representations placed in the document by the second and third recording modes by having the cursor located on such representations when in a playback mode.