Computer Voice-recognition Programs: Are They Worth the Cost?

I admit I'm one of the many people whose typing skills is not up to par. I am an average typist who can produce a document at about 45 wpm once I get going. However most of the time that just isn't fast enough. Most of the time I end up staying up late trying to finish writing documents for my college classes, e-mails, and freelance assignments. And somehow my typing skills seem to get worse the greater the rush I am in. With great hesitation, I decided to enter the world of voice dictation programs.

I was extremely skeptical when I began this process. Not only had I heard bad reviews of voice dictation programs, but the programs also seemed extremely expensive especially since I was working on a budget. I reluctantly decided to purchase the computer program put out by Dragon called NaturallySpeaking. It was the most inexpensive version produced for the general consumer at a price of $100. At this point, I was truly hoping I was not going to regret purchasing a program that could possibly not work for me.

After opening the box, I was able to install this program with relative ease. However, I quickly discovered that the headset included was made for someone with a much smaller head than me. I decided it was a better decision to return to the store and purchase a separate microphone to use the program since the training is based on the microphone being used, and the last thing I wanted to do was retrain this program.

The Training Process
The installation seemed easy enough, but I seriously wondered if this voice dictation program would actually work and would recognize my speech patterns. The biggest question my mind to was could I produce documents are with the voice-recognition computer program than I could typing. Initially I spent about 45 minutes teaching this program to recognize my speech patterns by reading to it. It also had the ability to give additional training to this computer program once the initial training was completed. After training, I decided to type a nursery rhyme in a document to see what would happen. And this is the result:
Comfy dumpy sat along comes the county had a great fall and looking sources and all the Kingsman couldn't comfy together again
If you couldn't guess, I was attempting to dictate the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. And yes the result was worse than I expected; I was just hoping that after several hours of use would improve the voice-recognition skills of this computer program.

Two hours later...
I decided since I was willing to spend that much money on a computer program that might work, I decided that I should also put any effort to make it work. So I devoted to hours of my day to training the voice-recognition part of the program with better results. I essentially started rambling topics of the top of my head, picked out the words that the computer program did not recognize, and then entered them into the training feature. The end result was this document - which was produced with minimal keyboarding used only during the editing process. And in case you were curious here is how the nursery rhyme finally turned out: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, and Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the kings horses and all the Kingsman couldn't put humpy together again. I think anyone would agree that this was drastic improvement over the computer programs voice-recognition skills I started with.

The Verdict
After putting in the time and money, I've decided purchasing a voice dictation program is well worth the expense. I can write documents much faster since I can speak faster than I will ever be able to type. Also, background noise during the voice dictation process of a document is not a factor. I never had a problem with background noise causing interference with the document I was producing at the time. Granted this computer program will not reduce the amount of work I have to do, but it will take less time to type the documents I need to complete. On a personal note, I would not trade this computer program and for anything since it is made typing easier for me and increased the amount of free time I have. So if you are willing to spend the money and deal with the strange and silly typos you will encounter, it may be worth looking into.