Nuance Dragon Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home 13 (Old Version)

I havent started using it intensively but the voice recognition training went pretty fast. One important thing is that the description of whats included in the package dd not list headphones and strongly implied that a separate headset needed to be purchased. So I bought the Koss CS 100 headset along with the software. Imagine my shock when i received the software and found the included headphone. Why this wasnt made clear in the description I dont know. But, unless you dont care about throwing away money this is important.

I certainly would not recommend Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13. First of all it was hard to get installed. I even called technical support for help and they had me download the program to install and it still wouldnt work. After many hours of trying to install it, it finally installed. However, it kept hanging up. It wouldnt even run long enough to go through any training for it. The training feature of this program gave the warning that the training program was not compatible with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The program also gave warnings about a third party program interfering with it and I could never find any other program running. After searching on line for a solution I finally tried using the voice recognition feature in Windows. Windows voice recognition works wonderfully. It does everything that Dragon NaturallySpeaking says it would do and and takes dictation very fast. Naturally you have to give it some training as you would with any voice recognition program. I am writing this review with Windows voice recognition. It keeps up with me wonderfully gives me tremendous control of my computer through voice commands. No, I do not recommend Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13. I just wasted a lot of money which I cannot afford to do. I see no reason not to use the Windows voice recognition program when it works so well.

Firstly, dont purchase the disc + headset bundle. The software already comes with a headset included in the box, a fact which I discovered after ordering and receiving the bundle and ending up with an extra headset. So ordering the bundle will result in you receiving the software and the headset it comes with in one box, and another box with a second headset. That offer is quite deceiving. Despite being annoyed at spending a little extra money, I didnt consider it worth returning the extra headset since I got it all on sale for a decent price, and because I may end up needing a replacement headset at some point anyway. As for the speech recognition itself, its decent. Not as amazing as I was hoping; I do have to spend a little time correcting mistakes, and it also slows you down to have to speak the punctuation out loud. But this is the first speech recognition software Ive used, and Im betting as far as speech recognition goes, its good. The uses of the Home version are kind of limited because of it not being compatible with many programs, meaning it will not enter the text directly into said programs/emails/etc. for you. But it can still be used pretty much anywhere by putting the insertion point where you want the text, and then as you speak your speech will appear in Dragons dictation box, from which you can easily transfer it to your designated spot with a simple click of the Transfer button. So, I found that pretty cool. My main reason for getting Dragon is Im a transcriptionist and my hands tend to get tired and stiff from typing. I was hoping that me dictating and then editing would be at least as quick as me typing, as well as sparing my hands from strain, but so far, its not really been worth it due to the time it takes to continually transfer the speech from the dictation box into my program, which gets me behind from dictating the words from the audio Im listening to, so then I have to skip back the audio once the dictation box gets out of the way, plus edit any mistakes I see, and I actually find it easier to manually insert punctuation when I review each portion that I transfer rather than speaking all of the punctuation. Eventually I may be able to make it work out better, but so far, it slows me down a bit, so I only use it sometimes. Just figured Id explain that for anyone else considering this for transcription. But the speech recognition aspect is decent as long as youre willing to check for mistakes. There tend to be at least a couple or few mistakes per paragraph in my experience so far.

I use it to dictate all my notes for clinicals and I have about 20 to 30 notes to put in on each patient. At the end of the day my fingers are falling off! They helped saved me from getting finger cramps. Its a little annoying at first but I use a lot of medical terminology but it learns as it goes. I had to correct it a couple of times and now it picks up on most of the words. I really enjoy it. Still trying to get the hang of the other functionalities involved but I mainly use it to type for me.

I am using the Dragon (DS13) Software 13, and it is an extremely sharp tool. With his help, I do think my computer, and I can take over the internet. If I only had a brain, comes to mind, but this software is great! I recommend this product to any and every writer to preserve the quality of a penciled or penned draft. Have a nice word on me. DMF :)

I was actually surprised at how accurate it is, especially after such little training of the program. I tried varying my voice, speaking very succinctly, but then also very naturally with run together words and higher speed and it kept up impressively. Most of the errors were my own as it is a little unnatural to say all the punctuation out loud. Its spelling is impeccable and I may be hallucinating but it seems to pick the right word in context for words that are similar in sound like hear and here. Maybe Im imagining things. Im using it to transcribe 100 yr old typewritten pages for archiving and it turns out to be quicker to read the pages out loud than to use professional OCR software which is inaccurate for typewritten text from old mis-registering typewriters on aging and stained paper. Correcting the OCR is very time consuming. Theres far less to correct using Dragon (most are my errors anyway) and you can make many corrections using voice commands while transcribing. As it seems to work as an input device like a keyboard (albeit with a clipboard-like step) I suspect Ill be finding ways to use it in multiple programs. The headphones that came with it work very well and are comfortable over a few hours. It was very easy to set up, though it took a while for installation to complete. Overall, I love this thing!

I purchased in order to do academic writing--reading source material into the computer for later reference is much faster than propping up a book and typing it in. It is a memory hog though. With 4 GB memory, I find that I need to shut down everything but this and Word in order for it to operate acceptably. There still are a few things about it that bug me, but for the price it is a good buy. It comes with a headset, which I did not know, so I bought a bundle with a headset. You dont need to. In fact, the bundled headset didnt even work, so I sent it back.

I am in the process of writing a book and am a horrible typist. So its taking forever. I stumbled upon this software while reading some writing blogs. I almost didnt buy it because of the negative reviews but I figured, for the price, why not? I purchased the disk version, used an external optical reader to load it on to my computer and it worked out of the box, as advertised. I was afraid I was going to have problems getting it loaded because it took literally 10 full minutes before it started installing. Perhaps people are just aborting the process when it appears to lock up? I went through a couple of screens with the install wizard before it appeared to freeze but I just left it alone and it eventually loaded with no problem. Of course, I have a newer computer so that may make a difference. I have had no problem getting it to work at all and the accuracy is exceptional. Certainly far better and quicker than anything I could produce. I have a relatively neutral accent and am a public speaker so I do tend to speak and enunciate my words clearly. I only use Dragon for Word to work on the book; I did not load it onto my browser. My productivity has gone up exponentially! I am not using the headset that came with the box; instead I am using a $60 Microsoft headset I bought off Amazon a while back. Using the headset makes working on my book as mobile as working on my laptop - even when dictating while at my sons baseball practice, the headset did not pick up anything other than my voice (not the music, coaches, kids or external sound). I did let the program peruse other documents, including my current book draft, so that it could learn my writing style and pick up some vocabulary words. Between that and reading the passage that Dragon provides to train the program, it took all of 10 minutes to train. I went back and forth on whether to get the home or premium version. For my needs, this home version is perfect because Im not going to use this for Excel, nor am I going to use an external voice recorder. Finally, I began practicing law over 20 years ago and always used dictation (because I couldnt type) so relearning dictation commands hasnt been difficult. Dragon comes with a cheat sheet to help you while you learn the commands. Ill keep it with me till I learn everything and then store it away. If youre thinking about purchasing this program, Id say go for it. For the price of a family meal at a restaurant, its a relatively low risk investment.

Ive been a happy user of earlier versions but after my laptop updated itself to windows 10, I found myself forced to buy version 13.0. Purported to be a great improvement, I was sold, but Ive not yet gotten it to work. After the install, I went through the microphone preparation and launched Word. The supplied headset was used. Not a single word was understood. Nothing. Frustrated, I eventually did a clean install only to get an error message that some training directory could not be renamed. Installed again without trouble. Still didnt understand a single word. Switched mics. Nope. Decided to use my wifes brand new i-7 laptop with 16GB. Installed fine but still didnt understand a single word. I reached out to tech support and got a couple suggestions. No good. Reached out again and got a suggestion to check the settings. After 3 laptops, 3 mics, and multiple attempts at setting default mic, sound card settings, hardware acceleration, etc, Ive given up. Fortunately, I found an old laptop and installed version 12.0 on it. It works flawlessly. My new laptop? I use Windows speech recognition. While not as robust as Dragon, it isnt half bad. My only regret is that I tried to upgrade to new and improved. Im beginning to think there might be an error on my disc. Nothing but trouble for me.