September 21, 2008

My friend who works at Nuance, sent us a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, their voice recognition software, so we could play around with it.

So I installed it and gave it a quick whirl. My impressions were favorable. I had tried a previous version, and had been rather unimpressed. This version installed easily (although it reported several errors that I chose to ignore) and seemed to work without any training. It was easy to figure out what to do, and when I had problems, I was able to figure out how to do what I wanted using their built-in help.

I was disappointed that swear words weren't included, and that training them as new words didn't seem to work :-) But otherwise it was pretty good. I'm a fast typist, so I won't be trading in my keyboard, but if I had problems using a keyboard I'd definitely want a program like this. (I guess John McCain never heard of this type of software).

The basic package looks like it starts at about $100. If you call them, ask for Rachel Elias - that's the friend who sent the demo copy.