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With a little practice you can pretty much manage everything you could want. Other productivity tools, like Outlook, work especially well. Tell the browser to "search Amazon for Jim Butcher," and up pops a list of his books. Google searches worked well, but the really cool interaction skipped the search engine altogether. More fun, however, was navigating the Web.
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OS controls are good-I found it easy to navigate Windows Explorer for example, and to switch between windows. It works best in quiet environments, of course, but in my testing Dragon handled ambient noise fairly well.īeyond Transcription Dragon also offers powerful abilities to interact with the OS and applications other than word processors. In addition to dictation, Dragon NaturallySpeaking can also perform functions in numerous applications (spreadsheets are popular among users) as well as read back to you whatever you've written. Say the number of the comma you want to change, and it's instantly highlighted and ready for your next move. Say "select comma," for instance, and Dragon will highlight every comma on the visible portion of the document, annotating each one with a superscript number. As a personal preference, I'd rather they remain hidden but exactly where I want them.ĭragon makes editing simple, too. If icons are obscured by the menus, Dragon will slide them over and into view. The UI will also bump you desktop icons around, which made me a little nuts. The screen can feel cluttered rather quickly, but you can always turn off or adjust the help menus once you get the hang of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. They're integrated onto the screen and appear alongside whatever program is active. While there is a learning curve with Dragon, much of how you learn is fairly natural because of the way the help menus and tips are displayed. Formatting, like adding bold to a font, works with voice commands, too.Įxperimenting some more, I tried commands like "select previous two words," and "go to end of line," darting my eyes to the right to peek at the list of tips when necessary for a little extra help. Dragon's accuracy cannot be beat, but even a scarily accurate computer transcriber doesn't know where to insert commas, quotation marks, and the like, so you have to train yourself to say "period" or "full stop" and all other punctuation. Speaking at a normal pace in a slightly hushed volume, I saw remarkable results. I'm no Henry Higgins, but I my elocution is clear enough, but I didn't find any need to put on a broadcaster voice for Dragon to nail every word. Every utterance appeared before my eyes with only the slightest lag. I started by saying aloud some notes and ideas I had about Dragon itself. The hardest part was deciding what task I wanted to complete. I had no problem flipping the microphone on and dictating. I jumped into Microsoft Word and watched Dragon pull up a list of tips and functions for using voice controls to do my word processing. A vertical help bar appeared on the right side of my screen (you can move it, customize it, and turn it off) that automatically updated depending on the active window on my desktop to suggest the most common commands for that particular app. Dragon pushed started offering tips immediately, like the location of a microphone icon to turn voice commands on and off.
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Rather than read all the details about how to get started, I was curious to see what would happen if I tried to wing it.
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You can also automate Dragon to read files stored in those two locations on a regular basis to refresh its list of personalized words.ĭragon in Action When I fired up the software for the first time, I found it bizarrely intuitive. To further help Dragon understand your vocabulary, you can opt for the program to read files in the My Documents folder or sent messages from Outlook so that it can better guess words that it might not understand off the bat, like proper nouns. The program lets you choose your accent from a selection if you prefer, with options from Indian-accented English to Great Lakes region American English to Southern U.S.

The setup took less than 10 minutes, which included reading provided text for about four minutes to acclimate the software to my voice and accent.
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Set Up I tested Dragon NaturallySpeaking on a PC running Windows XP (more on the system requirements below). The hundred-dollar baseline price tag on Dragon keeps it from being an impulse buy, but if you've been seeking a solution to any of the above-named problems-or any other that could be solved by voice commands and real-time transcription-Dragon is a worthy investment.
