Dragon Naturally Speaking

I've used Dragon Naturally Speaking since its very early days, when it wasn't worth having.  It's certainly always been interesting to use - and especially to watch - even back then, but in terms of practicality I'd say it was really version 9 before I felt it was a net plus.  Of course it depends on whether you can type at all.  I forced myself to learn to touch-type a very long time ago and I've typed more words than I could possibly count, so it's not such a big deal for me.

UPDATE: I now have the 11.5 update and I've put it through its paces.  I've embedded some sample videos below, including one showing just how well it works with an iPod Touch as a wireless microphone.

 

That said, now I'm getting older, I find my fingers hurt sometimes and I'm worried about the beginnings of arthritis so anything that makes it easier to do the "typing" I want to do is always a welcome bonus.

Over the course of the next few days I'm going to be adding to this page with a full review of Dragon Naturally speaking and some video capture of it in action.

The text below was created using Dragon Naturally Speaking, as shown in the video above.  Personally I think this is a great piece of software and if you have any need for regular content creation it's a great way to do it.  If you never "type" anything, then it's not for you, but remember you can use it on almost anything, including Chat windows so the uses are far more than you might imagine at first.

You can see a video of Dragon NaturallySpeaking in a Yahoo chat window at the very bottom of this page.

So, I am going to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to dictate an article telling you about Dragon NaturallySpeaking!

If I make a mistake as I'm speaking I will leave the mistake in and show you how I correct it.  Even though you get very good recognition and accuracy with Dragon NaturallySpeaking you do still get an occasional mistake, particularly if you're working in a noisy environment.  My children are making a lot of noise outside at the moment so we may see a few more mistakes than I would normally expect to see when I am working in a quiet environment.

The speed of Dragon NaturallySpeaking depends, of course, on the speed of your computer and I would be the first to tell you that the modern computer with a powerful processor is an extremely beneficial in and welcome bonus to the speed of recognition.  If you have an older machine, to be really blunt about it I would probably say wait until you can afford a new machine and then you will benefit from the software otherwise you are going to have a lot of frustration when the software fails to keep up with you and does not recognise words accurately.

As you can see, you can speak ahead and the software will catch up with you so that if you have a particular train of thought you don't have to stop and think and then wait for the software to try to catch up with you.  If you do have pauses when you're thinking about what to say, for example as I'm doing here, that's fine the software will simply wait for you so it's no real problem if you can't speak as fluently as somebody on the television for example!

As you can see you can go back even a few paragraphs and correct something that you've missed earlier so this is fairly flexible and very easy to work with.  What else can I tell you about the software?

Well, I can tell you that it gets better with training and that the initial training probably took me around 25 minutes and I have to be honest it was extremely boring.  Now, if you avoid the initial training you will get nothing like the quality and accuracy that you are able to get with a little bit of effort so personally I would recommend that you take the time to do the initial training.  When you make corrections -- as you will -- you should also make sure to save your user profile so that the corrections can be incorporated into the database for future usage.  That has the effect of making the accuracy even higher in future.  So, in other words, the more you use this the better it gets!

As I mentioned in an earlier part of my article I am beginning to get some pains which appear to be related to arthritis in my fingers and for me concentrated bursts of typing are beginning to be painful.  As you can imagine then the software is an absolute boon in avoiding that pain.  You can also do some basic application control such as clicking on buttons by voice control alone, although personally I don't use that facility myself simply because I don't want to but it is there if you do.

I hope this little application sample has been useful to you and as you can see from the timer bar in the video window the entire thing has taken about six minutes.  If you were to time yourself typing this much text I am fairly certain that it would take most of you a lot longer than six minutes, unless you are already a trained typist.

 

 

Thank you for watching the video and if you have any more questions please feel free to visit me at the link given below!

You can get a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking at a very good price from Amazon - just click here