Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred 8

In all I can say the software more than adequately does the job, hence I gave it five stars, but (and I can't stress this enough), make sure you have sufficient RAM in order to deal with the program. My computer (1.8 GHz, 256 MB of RAM) runs a little too slowly at present, although I am buying 256 MB of RAM tomorrow to try to remedy the situation. A second issue, which comes to mind is that you do, and will, needed quite a bit of patience in order to train the software. It works fairly well out of the box (well above 90% accurate), but in order to perfect it, it will take a while (five hours or so). My only gripe is that it is fiddly to use it to edit and correct text, but to be honest, that may, again, be my lack of familiarity rather than the software itself.

That aside, the program does an outstanding job in regards to all its claims. In my situation, part-time legal adviser, part-time Master's student, it is doubtlessly going to prove invaluable.

To all and anybody with enough RAM in your computer, I highly recommend this program.

Just for the record, I own a preferred version, as I hope to use the mobile dictation option in the near future. I will write up another review when I've tried it as I can't find anything on the Internet to help me decide whether it works or not. I will probably be using the Sony M.S525, although I might use one of the SX models-if you know which are good please send me an e-mail. Many thanks in advance.

....and yes I only used the software to write this review (and I even posted this article using it, so maybe I'm getting the hang of it!)

PostScript: I have left is the errors where they happened so they you may have an idea about the accuracy of the software, pretty much straight out of the box (I've been playing with it for an hour or so).


The best product   January 25, 2005
Frank Sanford (Geneva)
126 out of 126 found this review helpful

I have used a voice recognition software for many years and I have tried them all in various versions: IBM ViaVoice, Philips FreeSpeech and of course NaturallySpeaking. For anyone who has not tried this type of software recently, it has improved leaps and bounds over the years, especially in the critical ability to correct by voice on screen. It is only if you do this that any of the software packages learn and improve their accuracy. While the other packages have more whistles and bells, allowing you to open and operate programs by voice, it is NaturallySpeaking that is by far the best at the core job of producing text from voice. It is very quick to get going out of the box and reasonably robust in the face of background noise. I thoroughly recommend it. Version 7 was also very good. By the way whatever the package you go for the quality of the microphone is critical and the one in the box is always poor. I have used the Philips Speechmike Pro for several years now and I think it is brilliant (Model LH6274). It is expensive and difficult to find, but worth it. This review has of course been dictated using NaturallySpeaking.


RSI sufferers rejoice... it works!   February 12, 2006
Rich (Sussex, UK)
56 out of 56 found this review helpful

For the last year and a bit I have been having a nightmare of a struggle with RSI (mainly tendonitis), and my challenge has been to make my computing comfortable and easy. Typing recently started to really hurt my wrists and arms, I can literally feel the tendons every time I moved my fingers. Not good... not good at all to a 2-years young bloke who loves martial arts and so needs full use of his arms.
I've ordered a goldtouch split keyboard from America, and got it very cheap so i'm looking forward to that arriving as I work as e-mail tech support for an antivirus company.

However, after doing some research I decided I would give voice recognition software a try. Having never used it before I was somewhat dubious as to how well it would work, after all voice recognition software doesn't have a track record as being particularly accurate or user-friendly, does it?

I went out and got myself a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 after reading lots of positive user reviews on Amazon and another website, and I can safely say the results have been nothing short of amazing.

The program is very easy to use and integrate with just about every application you can think of, whether it be e-mail, instant messenger, forums, or of course good old Microsoft Word. The product claims an accuracy rate of 95% straight out of the box, however, if like me you don't speak the Queen's English and happen to have a slight northern accent then you can expect around 80% to start with.

However, the true magic of this program is in the way it learns. If the program makes a mistake, you simply say aloud: “spell that” and the program analyses the last sentence or word spoken. You can then correct the spelling or tailor the sentence to what you intended, and also click the “train” button to repeat the sentence aloud and thus tell the program to recognise that word or sentence the next time you say it. Although it can be a little bit stop and start at first, gradually as you use the program and training more often, the less you need to correct it.

Another feature of the software is the ability to control computer functions using your voice, from opening folders to copying and pasting or simply accessing the start menu or opening and closing your programs, it allows a great deal of flexibility. Not the be all and end all, but certainly useful.

All in all, I am terribly happy with this product, and it is doing exactly what it says on the tin. I now no longer need to type away at the keyboard at home and my wrists are going to thank me for it!

I recommend it to anyone suffering from RSI or any computer-related injury, who finds typing painful or uncomfortable. It is now a permanent fixture on my hard drive... until the next version that is.

Oh, and did I mention that I used it to make this review?

4.5/5.


Truly 99.9% Perfect   October 24, 2005
,Stanley E Towner (Surrey United Kingdom)
47 out of 48 found this review helpful

I have been using the Dragon speech to text programs for several years now with each edition giving improvements in accuracy and speed of operation, but edition 8 is by far the best program of its kind that I have ever used.

There are was a short training period that took a minimum of time and then I was able to start straight to away to dictate correspondence, e-mails and composing the text for a website. In Excel, entering data and moving about the sheet is a real breeze. The program appears to have a vaste and up to date vocabulary so that it is only occasionally that I have to train it with any new words that are particular to my way of speech. Using a mouse or keyboard is hardly ever necessary with this program that now has such a comprehensive list of voice commands.

A tip that I saw in a review in America, was the importance of having sufficient RAM memory. This person recommended having 1 GB of RAM memory. I have now installed additional memory to bring it up to 1 GB (it is so cheap these days). It does appear to greatly assist with the speedy operation of the program in getting the text onto the screen and of course it does have other benefits by way of speeding up your computer generally.

Another tip I have found to be most useful in helping the program to learn words and familiar phrases that you use, is to run the acoustic optimiser every week - it only takes a few minutes to perform and in any case a tea or coffee break can be good for the throat after all that dictation.

The only quibble I have with this new program is that they have been unable to overcome the problem of it not reading back to you e- mailmessages or web pages but perhaps we will have to wait for edition 9 for that


Heavy on computing power but works well   January 12, 2006
43 out of 44 found this review helpful

I bought this software as I am abysmal at touch typing. There were no problems setting up and the instruction manual provided he is very detailed and helpful. I work across three separate sites and have found that the biggest difficulty I have faced with this software is that it requires a very powerful computer to get it to work smoothly. The one it works best on is say Dell Precision 380 with a 3.2Mhz Pentium 4 processor and 1 GB of memory. Anything less, and you will find that the text appears very slowly and the programme will often hang.

As far as accuracy goes, it works well for general staff, but less well for anything vaguely technical. This is despite having trained the software on more advanced technical language. I have also found that it works best with things like Microsoft’s Word, and that trying to use it with other applications is less successful (e.g. dictating text for an e-mail). However, as each week passes and I train it more and more, and in particular try not to delete but instead correct each error, the accuracy seems to improve.

A couple of other points of worth noting. I haven't run across any problems with the quality of my microphone. It's a pretty standard and cheap microphone attached to a headset and it seems to work perfectly well. Finally, if you're someone who needs to transfer their sound file around (you can export your trained DNS voice file), you will need a very substantial flash drive or have to do it by CD-ROM. For example might DNS voice file is 320 MB.