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Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.0 Professional

By Cade Metz (PC Magazine 31.07.06)

When I reviewed version 8 of ScanSoft's Dragon NaturallySpeaking in May 2005, it handled speech recognition better than any other commercial product ever installed within the walls of PC Magazine Labs. That same month, ScanSoft announced a merger with Nuance Communications, a company focused on providing various technologies to customer call centers. And now, more than a year later, the combination has unveiled version 9 of the famous speech-recognition product—an app that's even more powerful than its predecessor.

Nuance calls Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 "the first desktop speech-recognition solution to truly remove the time needed to train the software and still deliver results." That's not far from the truth. I tested Dragon 9 with training and without, and the difference was minimal. With training, it was 95 percent accurate or more. Without, it was at least 90 percent accurate. And correcting the mistakes the app does make is a breeze.

The other cool thing is that Dragon 9 automatically integrates with all sorts of popular Windows applications, including all Microsoft Office apps, Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, Corel WordPerfect, Mozilla's Firefox browser, and more. Open the floating DragonBar, open Microsoft Word, and you're ready to dictate.

Make no mistake, however: Dragon 9 is far from flawless. It can put a serious drain on older systems. In fact, my biggest complaint is that the app often slowed my machine to a crawl—even though the 1.2-GHz Pentium M processor and 512MB of memory slightly exceeded Dragon 9's minimum requirements.

Also, high accuracy rate may not kick in until you spend at least some time getting used to the product. Dictation is definitely a skill, and if you've never done it before, you may find it a bit tougher at first than you had expected. But if you've used speech recognition in the past, you'll need only a few minutes to install the app and get down to hard-core dictation. And if you want better accuracy, training doesn't take long. You can run through the whole process in less than an hour.

I installed the product in about 10 minutes and then went through the entire training process. This involves a volume test, a test of the PC's sound system, and then about 15 minutes of dictation. To me, this was actually enjoyable. For 15 minutes, I had an excuse to read Lewis Carroll out loud. Once that was done, I let Dragon 9 scan my e-mail messages and Word documents to learn my particular vocabulary. This took an extra half hour. I've got quite a few Word documents.

The app then offers an incredibly slick set of video tutorials that walk you through almost every aspect of the product. And as you learn about each feature, these tutorials make it easy to try them out on the DragonPad, the app's bundled word processor. If you're a beginner, I highly recommend going through each tutorial. It'll take only another 15 to 20 minutes to finish them all.—Continue Reading: Speak and Spell

When it was finally time to dictate, my results were pretty darn good. Here's what it typed out when I read the first paragraph of The New York Times obituary of Robert Moses, in my normal voice, at my normal speed: "Robert Moses, who played a larger role in the shaping of the physical environment of New York State and any other figure in the 20th century, dotted early yesterday at West is the Long Island. Mr. Moses, whose long list of public offices only begins to hint at his impact on both the city and state of New York, was 92 years old."

That should read "than any other figure," and he "died . . . in West Islip, Long Island." But otherwise, it's letter—and punctuation—perfect. Punctuation is added by saying the name of a punctuation mark. "Period," for instance, or "comma."

Better still, I could correct mistakes without touching my keyboard. Simply by saying "Select dotted," for instance, I highlighted the word "dotted." Then I replaced it simply by saying the word "died." Similarly, you use voice commands to move a cursor or spell words out. You can also add your own custom voice commands. Let's say there's a particular phrase or graphic that you frequently add to documents. You can set a single keyword that triggers the app to add the whole phrase or graphic when you say it.

For comparison's sake, I then created a new user profile—an alter ego called Zed Camet—and didn't go through the whole training process. I still had to do the volume and sound systems tests, but that was it. When I read the Moses obit, the results were surprisingly similar: "Rose says, who played a larger role in shape physical environment of New York State than any other figure in the 20th century, died early yesterday at West is not long. Mr. Moses, whose long list of public offices only begins to hint at his impact on both the city and state of New York, was 92 years old." There were a few more mistakes at the beginning, but that long last sentence is perfect.

The product includes a noise-cancelling microphone headset, but you're free to use your own. For the first time, Nuance has also approved a list of Bluetooth wireless headsets for use with the product.

The full Professional app—the one I tested—is $899.99 direct, but slimmed-down editions are available for as little as $99.99. Do you need the Professional version? Maybe. It's the only version that automatically integrates with a wide variety of software apps. The Preferred version integrates with only Word and Excel, the Standard with only Word. But for most users, that's the only significant difference. Unless you're deploying the app across a corporation or building a highly specialized business or academic vocabulary, you'll be fine with the Preferred or Standard version.

Whichever one you use, you'll be impressed. But make sure your Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 system has more juice than my test system did.

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