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PCMag (USA)
Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 Review
PCMag (USA) - 20th May 2005.
By Cade Metz.
 
Speech recognition has never been this good.
Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 Professional, the latest incarnation of
the popular speech-recognition engine from ScanSoft, is better at
turning speech into text than any other commercial product on the
market we've seen. And though it still makes its fair share of
mistakes, correcting those mistakes is remarkably easy. If you've
been disappointed with speech-recognition tools in the past, Dragon
8 could turn you into a believer.
We tested the rather pricey Professional edition
($795 direct), but the same engine underpins more consumer-friendly
Standard ($99) and Preferred ($199) versions (see
www.scansoft.com/NaturallySpeaking for a rundown of the
differences). During ad hoc testing at PC Magazine Labs, after
roughly 20 minutes of training, Dragon was about 95 percent
accurate, and this improved after more training and more practice.
By comparison, IBM ViaVoice 10, the one-time Dragon archrival (now
also sold and marketed by ScanSoft), was only about 70 percent
accurate. Granted, Dragon can still be frustrating—especially in the
beginning, when you're still getting used to it—but thanks to a
slick tutorial wizard and a clever interface, it's far less painful
than you might expect.
Training the app is easy—even fun. After about 5
minutes of reading something as enjoyable as Lewis Carroll's Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland, the app will have a pretty good idea of
your speech patterns; if you like, you can ask it to analyse your
e-mail messages and Word documents, so it can get a good idea of
your writing style as well. This typically takes somewhere between 5
minutes and half an hour.
After that, you'll need another 15 to 20 minutes
to run the tutorial wizard, which explains each of the app's primary
features and lets you practice along the way. You will find that
practicing tasks with the wizard is a bit easier than using the
product on your own, but don't let that bother you. After just a few
more minutes of dictation, you should have things down.
The tool is smart enough to include punctuation
and format special text such as e-mail addresses, Web pages, times,
dates, currencies, and phone numbers automatically. But if you'd
like to improve overall speed and word recognition, you can use the
app's Performance Assistant wizard to turn off such tools
selectively.
As accurate as Dragon is, its ability to correct
mistakes is even more impressive. If the app gets a word wrong, for
instance, you can highlight it with a simple voice command, and a
menu will automatically pop up, giving you a list or alternatives.
If none of the alternatives are what you're looking for, you can
quickly input the right word by spelling it out loud. It's quite
easy to use the app without even touching your mouse or keyboard.
You can use voice commands to input predefined
text and graphics into a document. You can fine-tune the app's
dictionary with an easy-to-use Vocabulary Editor. And you can set up
commands to have different effects depending on the placement of
your cursor in a document. Plus, the new version now supports Palm
devices. Dragon has long been able to transcribe dictation recorded
on digital recorders and other handheld PCs, but this is the first
time it's been able to handle the Palm.
PCMag (USA)
 
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