Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 10.0 (PC DVD)

Product Description
Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred gives small business and advanced PC users the power to create documents, reports and emails three times faster than most people type with up to 99% accuracy. Surf the Web by voice or dictate and edit in Microsoft Word and Excel, Corel WordPerfect, and most other Windows-based applications. Create voice commands to quickly insert blocks of texts or images such as your name, title, and signature. Dictate into a handheld device when you're away from your PC, or use a Bluetooth microphone for the same great dictation results without the wires.

An Excellent product!
Honestly - a brilliant product, but you need a good computer with a bit of grunt under the bonnet. I have tried it on 3 computers and you need at least 3gb of ram and a good sound card. If your computer has this then Dragon will work perfectly. I have tried it on a Samsung NC10 netbook with 2gb ram and it 'just' about chuggs along.

This software takes the effort out of long reports, answering large amounts of emails, and is fun.

Bad Dragon
I have had this product for the last two months and used it practically every day since. I have gone through all the speech recognition tests etc but when I use the system the errors it makes is incredible. I am quite a slow typist but I am still ten times faster than the Dragon. Far from being 99% accurate, if you reverse that it is 99% inaccurate and about 1% right most of the time. It is by far the worst piece of technology I have purchased from Amazon and I wish I had returned it within the time frame to get my money back, because even at the discounted price it was it was still a waste of money. I will never purchase any product from Dragon Naturally Speaking ever again and certainly will not recommend it to any one else either.

low error rate, but still limited
The trouble with these speech recognition programmes is that errors tend to be harder to proof-read than errors made in normal typing. There's no squiggly red lines to show that one's fat fingers have gone awry, only wrong words perfectl;y spelled. Worse still, there's no accounting for dropped words (the meaning of a report missing a single "not" can be radically different from that intended). For this reason alone, the level of accuracy demanded from speech recognition is very great. Even though speedy and 99.9% accurate (and it is that) most of the time saved typing is then spent checking.

Still, better than version 9, and getting there...

Hands-free typing? Almost...
I finally had to update my old Dragon Version 5 when I acquired a Vista-based laptop. It's an ideal way of dealing with the awkward, small keyboards you get on laptops: plug in a mike and speak instead of typing! I'm very impressed with this new version: it's more accurate, faster and more versatile. You can use it with a greater variety of programs - I have even managed to do a little hands-free data entry in Excel. To be honest, navigating Excel was a nightmare because I couldn't work out what commands to use, and I couldn't locate any documentation on using Dragon with Excel.I have to say that the the lack of printed documentation is possibly the biggest weakness in the program. For a beginner, it may make the difference between getting a lot out of it and giving up!

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