Dragon Naturally Speaking: A Review

I have just recently bought, Dragon naturally speaking for my windows XP machine. I do alot of blogging, well a lot is an understatement, I actually run about 10 blogs. Of course I had to add new content to my blogs everyday. Dragon NaturallySpeaking is software that allows you to speak into a microphone device, and the computer will type out everything you say. This would save me a lot of time as I cannot type that fast, but I can speak really fast!

Installation of the software was easy, everything is pretty basic there. When running naturally speaking for the first time, you need to make a user profile for yourself. Then, you must train your voice with the new software. This is done simply by reading some text into your microphone. Setup time, can take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes depending on your voice and speaking habits. It took me about 10 minutes to set up.

One thing that most people don't understand is that they do not speak clearly. The human mind knows what words are and how they are used, but a computer does not know what a word means. It cannot use assumption based skills to figure out what you are trying to say. It merely hears what you say, and types exactly that. So you will have to speak very clearly to the computer. But clearly does not mean slowly, you just must enunciate the words while speaking. Also having a good headset microphone will only ensure you get the best performance.

And how do I like it so far? I'm loving it. I'm actually amazed at how well it knows my voice. Granted, it does make some mistakes, but mainly when you are not speaking clear enough. Words like "ice cream" and phrases like "I Scream", can often be mistaken. Also words like "four" and "for", and "red" and "read" . But what you'd expect it's not human? It's just merely typing what you're saying. And it does a great job at that!

All in all I am really thrilled with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Do I plan on using it often? Well I'm actually using it right now. That's right, this entire review was written with the use of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Not too shabby eh?