DRAGON NATURALLYSPEAKING 10 PROFESSIONAL

Talk to Your PC




Say the words "speech recognition software" and most people think of Dragon Naturally Speaking. Dragon has ruled the roost for years, partly because it's a perenially great piece of sotware, and partly from lack of competition. Event though Dragon now has rival products to contend with, it has secured its positions as the leading voide-recognition software with this new version. Here you get new automation tools, improved hands-free navigation, updates to the interface, and increased accuracy and speed.

Most general-purpose versions of the product include an Andrea NC-19 monaural headset, but the $349 Preferred Wireless Edition subtitutes a slock little Calisto Bluetooth headset from Plantronics. Dragon requires considerable PC muscle: a 1-GHz CPU and 1GB of free hard drive space at minimum, as well as 512MB of RAM. DUring setup, you create a user account, which involves choosing a language (U.K., U.S., Australian, Indian, or SE Asian English), a regional accent, and a microphone connection type. A vocabulary option lets you specify General, Command Only, or Teen. The Setup routine also requests that you read some of your e-mail and word-processing documents. All told, the installation process took me about 45 minutes.



I was very impressed at how accurately and quickly the program transcribed my test script, showing only occasional blips even when I spoke without pauses between words. You can actually decide on how much speed to trade for accuracy using a slider-a handy feature. But is Dragon better than the free translation feature in Vista? With straight forward text both were identical, but on more difficult materal Dragon made fewer mistakes than Vista. The more significant difference is that Vista shows a delay before producing text; Dragon was more prompt. Both programs let you launch other apps from the Start menu by speaking the command "Start Menu." For subsequent commands, Vista was more intuitive, but with Dragon, you also get time-saving Voice Shortcut.





Despite some problems-for example, typing while Dragon is running sometimes slows your system down- and an interface that's not polished as Vista's, Dragon is a serious dictation tool that beats Vista in accuracy, speed, and customization options, thus earning our Editors'Choice.-Michael Muchmore

PC Magazine November 2008