Dragon Naturally Speaking software
installation, setup, and use.
DIY-Computer-Repair can help!
A software review of the Dragon Naturally Speaking software and installation.
Note: Before installing this software it is recommended that you install and
test a headset with microphone (a noise canceling type microphone is best).
The following text was read using Dragon Naturally Speaking from the back of
the box. The text was copied from Dragon Pad straight into this document no
spelling corrections made from the original text:
"Dragon Naturally Speaking
A faster way to more done on your computer
Create documents, e-mail reports
,
and spreadsheets in minutes instead of hours by using your voice.
Control Your PC By Voice
Tell your PC what you wanted to do, such as
"send e-mail to Kate Lynn" read or "search the web for financial planners in
Houston, Texas," and Dragon makes it happen. It is that simple.
Keep Up With Your Brain
Capture your thoughts and ideas as fast as they come to you. Dragon premium
that you focus on content
- not typing - so
you can communicate better.
Work Comfortably, Anywhere
Say goodbye to pain and
repetitive
stress injuries. Control your PC in a relaxed hands - free mode. Dragon
premium works with a wireless headset (not included) for great diction
accuracy without wires. Or bring along your digital voice recorder (not
included) when you had out for the day; Dragon premium can transcribe the
audio files of your voice when you return to your PC.
Dragon Works The Way You Work
Dictate text and to all the applications you rely on throughout your day
- whether it's a custom program for work,
or your favorite instant messaging software.
Less stress at home, work, or wherever life takes you
With Dragon premium, you can break free
from the routine and experience:
Freedom to create documents, e-mail
,
status updates and more just by speaking your thoughts.
Freedom to control your computer more comfortably and naturally
.
Freedom to work your way using Dragon's options and simple custom voice
commands
.
Freedom to dictate anywhere with a wireless headset or a digital voice
recorder to capture your thoughts and ideas.
Freedom to do more faster for less stress and more success
."
Although I am still training the program you can see that the text is very
clear with only a few mistakes in punctuation, capitalization, but no spelling
mistakes.
If you do a lot of text dictation or translate documents from voice to text
(or voice recognition) this would be a better choice over typing. I haven't had a chance to try a
voice recorder to see how well the program will translate text to speech at
this time.
There are other
voice recognition programs that would cost less but would they be as good
or as easy to use? This program in the Premium version cost just under $200
well worth the amount of time, wear and tear on my hands in the long run.
The installation if fairly smooth but it does take fifteen or so minutes to
complete. Also the update hung on my computer due to the size of the drive I
have my temp files located on a Ram Drive of 4 GB (see
RAM Drive) and because the update file is over 500 MB in size.
The program will crash older versions of Front Page when used directly, one
way around this is to use the Dragon Pad or Notepad to dictate your thoughts
then copy and paste the text. With Notepad this however creates a formatting
problem with a HTML document, if you view source on this page you will see
that a few lines are not in "paragraphs" but have the < br > code at the end
of a sentence, this is the normal end of sentence or delimiter that you get
when you copy and paste from Notepad. However using the "Dragon Pad" the
normal HTML formatting will carry over and with out the 'Microsoft" formatting
you would get from say MS Word or Excel.
Other programs tested with Dragon are:
MS Outlook
MS Power Point
Overall if you do a lot of typing in applications this may be an
alternative to relieve the stress on your hands.
For me it took a little getting used to because I do most of my work in MS
Front Page.
I give this software a 9 out of 10. I called their support line when I
received the product because the headset/microphone was broken when I took it
out of the box, they sent a new one overnight!
The install was fairly easy but because of the size of update file it
failed, I had to remember that my temp drive is only 3.5 GB in size and 3.4 GB
of that is the swap file. Once I changed the path to the temp directory to a
larger drive the update took about fifteen minutes to complete.
This site contains a lot of information. As
with any publication not all information is available due to space, time, or
subject constraints.
If you have a question that you did not find the answer
on this web site you a can
ask your question here and we will endeavor to get you the most up to date
answer possible!
