Nuance Dragon Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home 13 (Old Version)

I have used Dragon since version 8. It had been pretty hit and miss back in those days. Version 13 is pretty tight. I very rarely swear at it like I did in the old days. : ) I am a writer and it makes it a breeze to do the rough draft of stories. Intricate editing not so much. But for me that is a huge time saver. One big improvement is getting a new headset. WARNING. Just because you think a headset is good doesnt mean that it is good for Dragon. There is a great company to help with finding it because Nuance is no help here. I have had great experiences with KnowBrainer.com. They help handicapped people use Dragon to enhance their lives. KnowBrainer has a list of headset microphones that work the best with Dragon. For example I bought a set of Sennheiser headsets which are normally a great brand. Well they werent very good for Dragon. One down side is Nuance is not the best with support. Dragon software has been sold a few times. And sadly support has not improved with the new companies. I will say that it has been rare that I have needed support.

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.

This program is, sadly, terrible. It lasts far behind your speech. Even though I purposefully speak slowly and clearly, the sentences come out garbled and unrecognizable. Words are missing. Sentences are truncated. It takes longer to edit the mess that comes out than it would have taken to simply type it. On fb I joined a group for this program, everyone says oh the home version? Haha, thats a joke. You must get the professional version. If they sold this to me and told me how wonderful it is and how much Id love it (and other outright lies) why the heck would I give them. MORE money and buy the pro version? Theres no support. The dashboard is confusing and unhelpful. When you look up the issues youre just told to delete your profile and create another one... In other words spend your life in teaching mode... Supposedly letting the program learn you speech (it never does). Terrible. Id give it negative 10 stars if I could. Sign me Extremely Dissatisfied Customer

Easy to use! A must have if you are writing a book! I also believe it would be a great benefit for those in college. I sure would have been grateful if I would have had one in school. I also bought the book that explains more about it, however I didnt even need the book. I am more of one of those hands on kind of learners. Biggest problem I found was, you need a very good microphone, I got a Koss that works like a charm. The book I read weeks later is very good as well, learned a few tricks. It is called The Writers Guide To Training Your Dragon. Covers everything you have to know and some. I thought I would have a hard time, being it was years ago since I was in school. Lol Found myself patting myself on my back. I kinda laughed out loud and said to myself, either this is really easy or Ive gotten really smart in my old age! Thanks ever so much Amazon for Ive gotten my writing skills back to my friends, and its much easier than writing in a notebooks for my books.

I had this on my PC at one point and then I had to reinstall everything and suddenly Dragon wouldnt install. It kept asking for some special program first. I called the help desk and the next thing I knew I was getting notices that people were trying to access my financial accounts and personal information. What Dragons help desk did with my personal information, I dont know. Sell it? Give it away? Or, did the person on the phone for Dragon have a side business trying to hack customers private accounts, bank, credit, etc.? Luckily, they didnt get far, as far as I know. I never did get it to work again, so I thought Id take a chance and buy a new copy, but instantly I ran into installation errors saying it needed some sort of program to run first and I had to dig into the software to find it. Why doesnt the software do it by itself? Even when I found and ran that program, it stalled and wouldnt install either. I give up. What a horrible company and program! They are a monopoly worth being investigated by the Feds. We need another company to compete with Dragon and give customers better choices.

Beware!! Nuance changed its software support policy with Dragon 13. Any program that is not explicitly supported by Dragon now has to be accessed through either DragonPad or the dictation box. This means that text within legacy programs, especially legacy email programs, can no longer be edited within that program. Instead you have to do all of your edits within DragonPad or the dictation box and then transfer the result into your legacy programs. This slows down the writing process at least 50% and interrupts your train of thought repeatedly. I reverted back to 12.51 without fighting for a refund. Dragon 13 may indeed have a 15% increase in recognition accuracy over version 12. But it also has at least a 15% decrease in usability, in my case considerably more than a 15% decrease. Having said that, if you know you will only be using programs that Nuance lists as fully supported, version 13 may work well for you. However, Nuance lists Mozilla Thunderbird as fully supported. A quick search of the net will reveal that there are many users that disagree and claim that Thunderbird is not fully supported in Dragon version 13 regardless of Nuances statements to the contrary. I STRONGLY advise against upgrading from Dragon version 12.51. Also, be sure to install Dragon from a disk copy rather than a downloaded copy. Regardless of the version there are many more installation problems with downloaded copies. Time for the scalpers to stockpile disk copies of 12.51. Get them while you can folks. Additionally, do NOT judge Dragons recognition success rate in any version using the microphone that is included with a disk copy of Dragon. To use this program effectively you MUST buy a separate good-quality USB microphone. I recommend the Logitech business line of headsets. At the time of this writing these Logitechs were designated with a B somewhere in the model number rather than an H. These may only be available on eBay at this point.

Its too early for me to review this yet; I just got it loaded. First of all Amazon sells it as a bundle with a headset/microphone that you dont need as one comes with the software. Even so, it was cheaper than buying it directly from Nuance. Installing it only took me an hour or more. :-( First I tried to do an advanced install and not load the things I did not need like Australian English, Asian English... After clicking the final go, the pop-up said it was installing, but nothing happened. I finally told it to install everything and it then loaded without a hitch. I then tried to use my USB headset and mic that I already owned and it kept telling me that it couldnt recognize what I was saying, so I tried switching to the one that comes with the software and that kept telling me that I had to press the on button on the headset and there isnt one. I finally created a new profile with my USB headset again and dang, that worked. Again, I havent used it much, but I can tell that it is heads and shoulders above the speech recognition in Win 7. Im not a blazingly fast typist, but I still havent decided which I prefer. I write short stories and occasionally my ideas get partially forgotten before I can type it all out so Im hoping that DNS will help. I hope to edit my review in the future.

Works great. Ive even used it to voice command Assassins Creed Syndicate. Placed on commands it works great to activate eagle vision, the rope launcher, or weapons etc. Just make sure you have plenty of RAM. Ive used this to dictate a book section that I needed, emails and other applications. Remember that the more you use it the better it gets. It does take a while to get used to the commands, but it recognized most words and is easy to correct using the mouse if needed. CONS: The microphone that comes with the product. You will get error messages that the sound is too low no matter what you do. I recommend the purchase of a USB microphone adapter. It will solve that issue and is cheaper than buying a usb headset. Will also allow you to listen to movies, games etc through the headphones which is great if you are a night owl like me and dont want to keep everyone else awake watching a movie at 3am. Would recommend for anyone who needs to do a lot of dictation such as converting hand written journals and letters to type etc.

I am writing this review using DSN 13. I had a very hard time downloading the software onto Windows 8.1. Thus the reason why I am giving it four stars. When I tried to install I kept getting a message saying the installation was interrupted and unable to finish. I searched on the Internet for fix actions and found one that worked for me. Create a guest account on your computer and install DSN 13 to that guest account, it took it a little while to start the download but it worked on the guest account and Im able to use it on my primary account. This is the link I found the fix action in http://nuance-community.custhelp.com/posts/c5c9614e18 hopefully this will work for some of you that are having a hard time downloading the software. Also on a side note I never had any previous Dragon software before this. The software itself I give 5 stars! I have had no issues with it after the install.

Ive been a Dragon user for years, so - when the new release came out - I purchased it and upgraded. It has been a disappointment -- the new Dragon bar at the top of the screen expands whenever I scroll near it, and I find the software is a lot less responsive online (I grade papers in Google Classroom, and the new version has a very difficult time recognizing online documents as text fields). After a few frustrating hours of trying to make it work, I uninstalled and tried to roll back to version 12. Unfortunately, I needed to then do a clean install and cant find the disk. I went to Nuance, figuring since I registered the product I should be able to download a clean copy and reinstall but they have no download area, and wanted me to send them ten bucks for a replacement disk. So, looks like Im moving over to Google voice to text... a real shame, after some six years of using Dragon.