Nuance Dragon Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home 13 (Old Version)

It works. Sometimes, it takes a while for it to start especially if it has been idle.

EDITED_It is working now. It took a total of 6 hours and deleting and reinstalling it three times for it to finely work. Good product just way to difficult to get to work. I suggest 1 it needs to take less then 4 gb of space and it needs to load faster. I think this product could be better. IT IS NOT WORKING. After five hours of fighting with this it is not working. My mic works. My mic works on the computer. I hear my self from the mic. I go through the dang profile thing and when it says to test your mic and I go to turn on Dragons button it stays red and not green. It will not work.

I had a very unexpected stroke several moths ago and my left hand still isnt completely back so this has been a real help. Except when I edit -- and I admit I do that a lot -- it cant seem to remember where we are on a page so I almost always have to go back and fix something or other manually. Maybe I dont speak Dragon well enough yet.

When I purchased Dragon I was a little pessimistic in the accuracy of the softwares abilities, but I can honestly say that 97% of my speech, at least, is faithfully transcribed into text. I needed this product because I injured my hands and cant type, and it has been a godsend. There are a few problems though. There is a little avatar that hovers around your text, and for me it constantly looks like its loading, trying to recognize speech, even when Im silently thinking. Also, sometimes when I turn it off and on again it doesnt work and I have to restart the whole program. Still, Im pretty amazed at the technology and thankful that I can write stories again.

I was an IT manager/Unix geek on Wall St for 25 years. The install for this product is one of worst I have ever experienced. It failed a few times, then proceeded, taking about 30 minutes to install all of the files. Various other issues with tutorial. Then came the software performance, which was abysmal. I followed all the profile suggestions, then tested it with the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The software was not able to reproduce the sentence even ONCE properly after many tries. Could not get the word quick until I taught the software the word. I tried various other readings, etc using both the built in microphone on my laptop as well as the included microphone. There were far too many errors, about 30-40%, Some words were so far off they were laughable. Slow as a turtle as well. My wife tried as well, total fail. We are both educated, articulate people, no speech issues. This software is simply not worth the effort, not ready for prime time. More effort correcting than typing would be. If you are totally disabled this may be a choice but it will be very frustrating. I am returning the product, dont bother ordering.

This program is not as easy as one would think. First thing you should do is buy a better set of headphones with the program. The pair that are included did pick up my voice well and caused me hours of frustration. It also does not work well if you are reading things like recipes. It clearly states that you should speak in a normal voice and at a normal pace, but reading a recipe doesnt always work that way. After about two hours of continually having to correct the word eggs I gave up. By the time I went back and corrected all the mistakes in the text it would have been faster to just type it myself. I would guess if I wanted to dictate letters or work on a term paper this would work fine, but its not what I purchased it for. What a pity.

I am a Computer Tech and I use this for emails and creating detailed Trouble Tickets. Mostly this is pretty good, but sometimes it misunderstands me. As I said, I am a PC Tech. I can be doing Tickets for clients and say Installed a Printer. Instead of the typed message, Windows opens the New Printer Wizard. Once I said Rebooted the PC and DNS almost rebooted my PC. Ive tried turning off the Commands portion, but that does restrict the functionality of the PC. BTW, it does not type curse words. You still have to delete the gibberish, but at least it is not profane. :)

Dragon Naturally Speaking Home Review I bought this one because it was the cheapest, but didnt consider the add-ons 1. Headphones ( the ones with two prongs and mic) 2. special connection jack 3. second special connection jack since the first one didnt fit my computer. It takes an hour to upload. I also had to watch Youtube videos to install the voice recognition mike and software, which I did. Ran through the tutorial, which shows you many things you can do--only to find out my version didnt do it. I went to the Chrome store and added a dictation box, since the software is made to work with Internet Explorer. On the introduction, I could choose from Southern American, Spanish Accented English, British English, and Standard. I chose standard, but soon found out certain words with U, OUR, or OU the the software had no clue what I was saying. I did talk slowly, ennunciate, and in full sentences. It also has an issue with homonyms. It spelled dawn as Dawn and Don. I could not use quote marks because my version didnt support it. I have read online that I can go into Microsoft office and tweak a few things, so I might try that. The home version is good for writing emails and searching the web. These were never things I had issues with. In the end, it made more work for me.

I am now going to review Dragon Naturally Speaking 13, Home. (Business comes with tools for using Excel and other business programs I dont use that much.) I found the installation process a little interesting as the program progress bar does not seem to move at first. After a while, when I was about ready to give up, it did move and the installation continued. However it was very, very slow. I had turned off my antivirus software as suggested and followed the prompts. Installation process was slow enough that I could have literally gone out, made a meal and then come back and found the installation still in progress. This concerned me a little because I was not sure that my computer was up to the task of running this program as expected. My computer runs Win 7 Pro, with a 2.66 GHz processor, four gigs of RAM even though Windows 7 can only utilize 3.5 gigs. I am now typing this in Word 2007 and it seems to be working quite well. When I went through the registration process, I noticed that it one point a window came up and said that it needed the serial number. The serial number was already in the box and was highlighted. When I pressed continue or next, a window popped up and said that the registration was not completed. I went back and took out the highlighted number and then retyped it using the numbers at the top of the keyboard rather than on the keypad, as previous experiences shown that some programs in some instances will not accept the import from the keypad the same way they accept information from the numbers across the top of the keyboard above the letters. DO NOT put n the hyphens, as I believe the program will not register properly if you do. There is a sentence that tells you not to put them in. Getting used to this is interesting as it seems to recognize all my words and unfortunately my bad grammar and my way of speaking in run-on sentences. However, as I learn the commands, I think that it will be quite helpful in getting my thoughts down at a higher rate of speed. So far the accuracy is very, very good probably more than 99%. It doesn’t like words like very, very good (two of the same word repeated.) I just tried using Dragon in Final Draft 2.5. I use it for script writing and for movie production. The Dragon box came up and would allow me to paste my text into the program and it seemed to work just fine. This one extra step is probably not a huge issue and will actually allow me to edit my thoughts better than if I type directly into the program. So very pleased with this program so far. Follow the instructions for installation to the letter. They are there for a reason and you probably won’t have any problems.

Had some serious stability problems with version 11.0 when it worked it worked GREAT but would do things unbidden and lost data so stop using it -Have not used version 13 much but Dragon seem to have cured the stability problems of 11.0 - Controls / pull downs / commands are different and will probably get used to them with more practice - Still cant get out of the habit of backing up on up three different files every few lines and then having to reread EVERYTHING each time because of problems with 11.0 which sometimes would make a change to a document file which would go unnoticed (some times working on page 20 and unbidden change occurred on page 1 !) and if backed up on only one file errors picked up after a back up were sometimes irrecoverable