Review by nonpareil

I bought this because my brother, who by his own admission is neither a good speller nor typist, recommended it so highly. The reason we got talking about it was that I was curious about some of the errors in his emails, which it turned out he was dictating. Since I am working on several novels and am always open to the help technology can give, I reasonably thought it might be a real boon.

But it is more trouble than it is worth. Not only does it lag behind my not-particularly-fast speech, but it makes grievous errors. I am trained as a radio announcer so am quite precise with p, t and other sometimes-elided consonants and have standard American English, I believe without regional inflection. So the software’s inability to decode my speech accurately seems unreasonable. I used it for quite a while and went through many, many hours of training on it, but still I was spending more time correcting its errors than it would take me to type out a tract from the beginning. And of course sometimes I was missing its errors which horrified my editor soul.

Then came Dragon’s invasive advertising, not just emails, but popup windows which I thought I had disabled on this computer. Even worse, something kept popping up that claimed I had not registered my copy when in fact I had. It comes with two copies. I wonder whether it wanted me to register both copies so if I switched computers, I’d have to buy anew?nnI believe I’ll follow another reviewer’s suggestion to try Windows’ speech recognition software. At any rate, my advice is to steer clear of this.