Review of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, Voice Recognition Software

Voice recognition software was not a foreign concept to me, yet the necessity of obtaining such a program didn't become a reality until about six months ago. I began receiving promotional flyers from Nuance, the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, which touted themselves as being the leader in voice recognition software.

Nuance merged several years ago with SoftScan, a company who made PDF Converter Professional, a program I use on a regular basis to convert my documents to PDF format. I assumed those flyers I was receiving for Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 originated from the fact I was a consumer of one of their products.

The flyers arrived with perfect marketing timing. I was in the process of typing up letters for a project, and while I am a fast typist, I dislike typing up prewritten documents. The concept of reading into my computer, as it typed automatically into my word processing program, appealed to me.

I immediately went online and did a bit of Google research. The results of the research, coupled with the affordable price of the program prompted me to go to the Nuance website and place the order, and take advantage of a discount they were offering.

I received a notification that the program was on backorder. The backorder notice continued for weeks, and finally I checked at a local Staples Office Supply and discovered they had a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, which I could purchase at a similar price.

After canceling my online order with Nuance, I went to Staples to purchase the voice recognition software program. The salesman advised me to throw away the microphone provided with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, and upgrade. Initially I wondered if he was simply trying to encourage me to spend more money, yet I now suspect it was a little of both.

Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 was fairly easy to installed, yet using it required training the program to recognize my voice. There is an option to sign in as different users, which would mean each user could train the program to recognize his or her unique voice.

Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 was not ideally suited for my project, which was genealogical in nature. There were many names mentioned in the document, and names can often have various spellings. Unfortunately, Dragon Naturally Speaking 9's first choice was usually not the appropriate spelling of the name.

Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 did perform excellently when reading off a series of numbers. Typing numbers, especially series of dates, can be tiring and prone to error. I experienced no errors when reading numbers using Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.

I have communicated with various users of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 who love the program and use it frequently. I have also encountered those who tried the program, and felt it produced too many errors to be of any reasonable value.

To successfully use Dragon Naturally Speaking, users should consider upgrading to a high quality microphone, something I did not do. They should also be prepared to spend the time training the program to recognize their voice.