Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home 11 [Old Version]

The blog writers on the net universally praise this product (but not Dragon 12, which appears to have some problems), and I praise it too. It's ability to transform speech into text with very little training is absolutely uncanny, and the more you use it, the better it gets. I does everything I wanted it to.

Yea, Dragon Naturally Speaking 11.0 definitely works well.-> I have a Gateway computer, processor = AMD Athlon 64, got 2GB RAM -- purchased back in 2006 (5 yrs old as of this writing!). The OS is WinXP (long live XP!). Using MS Office 2000. -- > So, u can see there is nothing fabulous, or "latest" about my system at all. ----> I was very concerned about this, because some users have said Dragon will only work on very newest, latest, sweetest, bestest, sexiest, etc.-> I am USA-born, American English-is-native-language, having a slight Chicago accent, but somewhat close to the so-called "accentless" speech of California.___________________________-> I did have an install glitch. "Error 1406. Could not write value Dragon Naturally Speaking to key \SOFTWARE\voice\speechrecognition\engine. Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel."I have seen This kind of error before -- when installing Turbotax in 2009 -- so I applied the same fix that Intuit customer support gave me: "To resolve this, go to Start-->Run and enter "regedit". A "Registry Editor" window will come up. On the left side of the window go to the above registry. Right button click on it and set the permissions such that you have full control. After this, try the install. -- Rey"So I went to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\voice\speechrecognition\engine...and applied what I learned from Intuit's customer support. :-)I guess it worked. The 2nd install went without a hitch. (Thanks *again* to "Rey" from Turbo Tax customer support!)______________________--> "Out of the box performance". OK, there is no such thing as "Out of the box performance," so I don't know how this statement could be used in their sales pitch??? I.E.: As part of the installation process, you have to walk thru some significant steps. (btw - Don't try installing this program unless you have at least 30 mins on hand). You set up a user profile, configure stuff, and at last you must read some stuff to Dragon so he can determine mic volume, the quality of mic connection -- and *especially* and finally --learn your voice/speech.You have some options on what to read, so I selected Kennedy's inaugural speech to read into Dragon's learning engine. It took some minutes to complete and... --> I was cautious to Re-Do stuff where I had stuttered, or read aloud wrong. Dragon software has a user-friendly re-do button -- just re-do the last sentence or even phrase. Foot stomp emphasis here! Don't be lazy: re-do your tongue-twisted speech errors! This is Dragon's learning phase, and these few minutes are probly the most critical!!! (Could utilizing the re-do button be an important key to my success???? maybe.... read on...)______________________--> I did *not* allow Dragon to parse my personal documents to learn my writing style and vocab. That's because I wanted Dragon to use what its designers already taught him about English -- and not be corrupted/influenced by any of my slang, misspellings, poor grammar of my personal docs, or whatever crap and corruption is on my hard drive. (It's impossible to account for all of this content, where I got it, or Heaven knows what I meant and in what context....???) I figure Dragon could live without that, and he has.----> IMO, certain users that have had trouble with this software allowed Dragon to do this step. Therefore, my recommendation is to just say to Dragon "No. Of course, Do not read my personal documents, you twit."-------> Also, for my purposes, I only intend to dictate to Dragon stuff that is at college-American-English level. If I ever want slang, I'll manually apply to the doc, I figure. I don't want Dragon to learn substandard English crap. Really.-----------> I do have a battery of 6 - 10 syllable techy words I want Dragon to learn, but that will be a controlled session, someday. Not some random grab from my drive.______________________As usual, Amazon delivered promptly in their usual standard of excellence. On that note - let me congratulate and thank Amazon for raising the industry-wide bar on this. Lot's of you young folks maybe don't know -- but before Amazon came along, we all accepted "allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery" as a norm, a way of life. I'm not saying Amazon invented fast delivery -- but they were a huge influence in making delivery in 3 - 5 biz days the standard. (An important piece of history for those who were raised in the era of qwk delivery, imo)

First, the quirks: randomly the software seems to almost "time out" if I'm away too long. All I need to do is re-start. But it's irritating.The people at Nuance will bombard you with news of "important" updates which are really ads to buy the next version. There is no discount for the "upgrades". As I just dropped 100 bucks on this software, Nuance, it's doubtful I'll want to drop another 100+ two weeks later (no kidding) for version 12.I am very pleased with the transcription and the integration with social media (FB, Twitter etc). The desktop navigation works well.The key for newbies: speak at your regular pace. One naturally defaults to speaking more slowly but believe me, it works better at a natural speaking speed. So pleased with this product. And yeah, Nuance, I might upgrade, but stop pestering me every week or two with your little alerts.

I'm writing this review using the software that I just got today. Anything in parentheses will be things I typed in by hand if I need to make notations or corrections.I was very reluctant to buy this with all the negative reviews, and the reports of bad customer service, but I finally took the plunge and I got the package today. When I was installing it I was having problems with an error message coming up whenever I tried to open the program and I almost gave up, but decided to try customer service despite all the bad things I'd read in reviews here.I was very happy that when I called, the phone was picked up right away with the customer service representative, and there is no charge for the service. As it turns out, the error I was experiencing was related to a Windows security update and the customer service representative was able to help me fix it very quickly -- or at least as quickly as it could be fixed given the extremely long reboot time for my computer, which he stayed on the phone with me for the whole time.So I can definitely save (say) the customer service issues that I've read about seem to be resolved or they're doing much better with helping out people having problems getting the software running.I open(ed) the software ended (and did) one of the training exercises, then proceeded to start using the software posting online and I've already even written an article for one site that I write for. One option on the training that was very helpful for me was an option to scan my documents for phrases I commonly use and incorporate that into the program so that it would recognize unique phrases for me.I write a lot about TV and music and pop culture, and the article I tried it out on was an article about the TV show "The Voice." I was very surprised that it got the names Adam Levine and see little green (Cee Lo Green) right the very first try, but as you can see from this example, the sea low (Cee Lo) green thing is of (a) little bit hit and miss. But honestly, I'm surprised he (it) gets that name right at all. It also spelled Christina Aguilera and Blake Shelton's names correct right from the get-go.another thing to bear in mind, is not only have I just gotten the software today and done minimal training -- just one of the training exercises -- I read a lot of complaints about having to talk very slowly with this program and I am actually talking pretty close to my normal speed with minimal errors considering that I just got the program and only trained it a little bit today.I should probably also note that I do phone work on unnerves (nursing) telephone lines so I do a lot of speaking. I've also done public readings with my writing and have even taken classes in voice and diction so I do have very clear speech, which I'm sure helps. I do have a bit of a "redneck" accent, but just use the standard accents setting when I was personalizing it, although I was tempted to try the southern accent. I was happy to see it correctly transcribed y'all LOL :-)So far I've just played a little bit with the commands, using it to open my Photoshop program, using it to post to Facebook, and using it to post to twitter. I have to say so far I am very impressed with the program, the prompt customer service was a very pleasant surprise as I was really worried about that, and I am really excited about learning to use the program more and continuing to train it to get more refined results. I really think this will increase my productivity with my writing, which is great because I am a terrible typist or as I always say, I'm a dyslexic typist.FYI, this version came with a headset which is what I'm using, and the CD-ROM in this package is labeled version 11.5 even though this listing is for version 11. At this point all I can say or type is --Dragon, where have you been all my life?

I bought this to work with my Sony voice recorder, and it doesn't work. The Nuance tech support people said I need to buy the more expensive version to get it to transcribe recordings. I'm very disappointed and find this software unusable even without the sony transcription.