Review by R. Song

Dragon Naturally Speaking Premium is a high-end speech dictation software package. This was my first experience with such software. This review was written using Dragon. My experience is limited to a few hours with this software.

Installing Dragon was simply a matter of placing the CD in the drive and following standard installation protocol. The package included a CD with the software, a quick start guide and a microphone headset. It loaded successfully on the first try and so far has shown no tendency to nag for registration or other issues. It does ask for permission to scan documents allegedly to improve performance of the software. I don’t believe these are scanned for content but rather for language structure and complexity in order to improve the algorithms. These requests are generally non-intrusive.

My installation was on a Dell workstation laptop using a high-end Intel core I7 processor, with 16 GB of memory. After installation was complete it asked me to read a sample text in order to tune the recognition algorithm. It periodically offers to scan documents and emails for unique words which you may select and then speak to improve the recognition algorithm thereafter. After completing the initial configuration I opened the brief interactive tutorial. It gave examples of typical commands but seemed rather sparse. I would have much preferred a more extensive and guided introductory tutorial.

After the tutorial, I opened a Word document and experimented by cruising the commands as described in the learning center (a task bar which appears on the right hand side of the screen). It quickly became obvious that pace-of-speech was important in eliciting the desired response. You must use a clear and controlled voice. My normal speech pattern (fast and little mumbly) resulted in a high frequency of errors early on. I suspect this may improve as the software learns my quirks of speech.

The learning center is context sensitive to the active application. Navigation, editing and controlling commands are very specific in format and must be followed precisely. Experimenting with the Dragon commands available for each application will seems to be a fine way to learn your way around Dragon. The learning curve seems quite rapid.

The speed of response when dictating is impressive although the software will occasionally lag behind the speaker. Best results are obtained by continuing to speak and trusting the software, as the speech will drop into a queue and appear a few seconds later. It does require some practice to learn to dictate properly.

So far, I’ve used this with Word, Outlook and Excel. It integrated smoothly with all three and the more I use it, the less I have to correct it.