Dragon NaturallySpeaking Essentials 6

Rating:
Summary: Works Surprisingly Well
Review: When I decided to try a voice recognition program, I first bought IBM ViaVoice 10. It would not launch on my PC - turns out that if you have any sort of firewall (or related utility) installed on your computer, it will interfere with ViaVoice 10, which uses the TCP/IP protocol. (Earlier versions of ViaVoice apparently don't have this problem.) After returning ViaVoice, I tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking v. 6 (Essentials), which I'd heard was actually superior to version 7. My expectations were low, but I was pleasantly surprised. After five minutes of training, I achieved reasonably good results. After an hour of training, results were excellent - especially when the program was used in conjunction with MS Word 2002, as opposed to DragonPad. Does Dragon make mistakes? Sure. But they are easily corrected, and in most cases not much worse than the typos you might make if you're a poor typist (like me). Besides, dictating to your PC is fun - and a welcome change from typing. The program also comes with a full-featured, printed instruction manual written in plain English by somebody with a sense of humor! This is a real rarity in these days of "online help" documents apparently translated from Japanese. I recommend this program to anyone who has the patience to train it, and a willingness to put up with some errors.