Dragon's speech-to-text offerings include $1,099 Medical Solutions and Legal Solutions editions, each with industry-specific vocabulary files.

We reviewed the full-featured Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 8, which costs a hefty $795, or $349 if you upgrade from version 7. Once you've finished installation, a discreet DragonBar toolbar appears at the top of your Windows desktop, with five pull-down menus to manage multiple users, improve speech-recognition accuracy, handle files, transcribe recordings, and seek help. Next, Dragon steps you through a thorough tutorial. You can add another half-hour to the installation by letting Dragon scan documents on your hard drive, which allows it to learn more about your writing and speaking style. We spent another 10 minutes following the New User Wizard, which explained how to create a personal profile and train the software to recognize our voice (using the included microphone for the latter task). This program has a high memory requirement of 256MB of RAM (512MB recommended).ĭragon's tutorial takes you through the basics of using voice commands to create and edit documents.Īfter installing the program, you must activate it online. The Custom Installation option lets you choose features to install, which can save substantial disk space. In our tests, the Typical Complete installation took about 10 minutes. Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 Professional is easy to use, beginning with a short and painless installation via CD-ROM.

All editions of Dragon share the same engine. Home users should opt for the $99 Standard edition or pay $100 more for the Preferred version, which enables dictation playback and transcribes to handhelds. Dragon performs better than we anticipated, but the Professional version is painfully expensive, gobbles up memory, and charges high rates for technical support.

Its transcription and networking features should serve business users and legal pros well.

It can learn your speech and writing patterns in order to deliver impressive, professional results. Dragon offers intuitive speech commands and lots of hand-holding to spare you from intimidation. It fills a need for PC users who can't or won't use a mouse and a keyboard. Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 voice-recognition software lets you use voice commands to produce text documents and surf the Internet, thereby minimizing your typing.

Dragon naturally speaking software.