Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Does Dragon Work?


  

Res Ipsa Loquitur

Do any of you have experience with this product?  Would you buy it again?  Better (but not more expensive) alternatives?




8 comments:

Eunoia said...

Yes, I have. It's a good product, at least for British English.

If you are doing repetitive, stylized dictation using a limited vocabulary, Dragon is the way to go. For large vocabularies the accuracy drops off a little.

The only problem is when I switch languages mid-text, it can't cope with multi-language dictation, but neither can anything else.

For German I now use the WIN7 built-in dictation SW, which is however, less accurate.

K-nine said...

I tried the iphone app version. It understood me and my southern accent very well, not so much the red queen and her upstate ny and new england accent. I never used it more than just playing around though.

Anonymous said...

"Did you say drag queen?" The company has been around forever.

alwaysFresh,neverFrozen

renojim said...

Yes, I used it for some time, and it worked quite well as far as speech recognition goes. It seemed programatically unstable though - on occasion, it would suddenly shut my machine down - not an uncommon problem with software written in C/C++ that didn't have it's memory management done correctly. So at one point I uninstalled it, and later when I tried reinstalling, I couldn't do it because of a 'version conflict' with some existing file on my system. Searching the web, I found it a common problem, and I also found that the company's support absolutely sucks. In fact, there is none, unless you want to pay pay pay. So I dumped it. Too bad, it was fun to use.

Anonymous said...

My brother in-law uses the professional version for doing his medical dictation. It will use cpu, so it may not run too well on 5 year old systems. It is also affected by quality of the sound - better sound card and microphone will definitely help. The pro version has different dictionaries that you can add to the product. Basically, it is best of the breed for voice recognition - outside of the NoneSuchAgency.

Chris in NC said...

My brother uses it and swears by it.

Anonymous said...

Best-selling Science Fiction novelist David Weber developed a degenerative condition in one of his hands a few years ago. He started employing Dragon Naturally Speaking (back when it was Version Seven) because typing his novels was proving too difficult.

Through Baen's Bar, he gave it very good reviews at the time, but warned it was taking him a while to 'train' the software properly. It's now in version 11 (well, 11.5), so in theory it's been improved since then, but as with any software upgrade it's hard to say exactly how improved it is verses how many bugs it has developed.

Tom Smith said...

I use it. Kind of a memory hog but what isnt

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