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Rating: 
Summary: I don't understand why this product is not more widely used
Review: I am a physician who dictates, on average, 5,000 word/day in patient records. I have been using ViaVoice exclusively for 2 years and am very happy with it's performance. I used release 8 with the medical vocabulary add-on initially, and recently upgraded to release 10. The upgrade has improved recognition.The program works best with streams of text, particularly with the multisyllable technical terms. I average over 95% recognition and I can dictate very fast and still get good recognition, even though my computer is 2 years old. Unlike the other reviewer, I always dictate into "SpeakPad" and copy into "Word" if necessary. I very, very rarely have problems with the program picking up extraneous sounds, but if you breathe into the microphone it will do that. On the downside: The User Manuel is pretty bad. The installation would be intimidating for an inexperienced user. There is lots and lots of discussion of using the program for program navigation and internet navigation. Why would you want to do that when it is quick and easy to do on a keyboard? This program is best used for text.
Rating: 
Summary: A buggy program
Review: ViaVoice's recognition accuracy is excellent (although it is annoyingly inclined to pick up all sorts of surrounding sounds and interpret them as short words). My problem is that it's a buggy program beset by software conflicts, notably with MS Word and Outlook. These other programs may be slowed down dramatically - up to 90% - when ViaVoice is open even if one is not using it. These software conflicts are attested to by the extraorinarily lengthy Readme file, which only begins to list the numerous conflicts. On some systems it apparently works fine while on others - often more powerful, state of the art systems - it just doesn't, and no-one seems to really know why. If you are one of the unlucky ones - or perhaps become one on a software or hardware change - the advice set out in the Readme file, and re-iterated by Microsoft on its website and by the ViaVoice technical support staff, is to disable functions in ViaVoice and the other programs that it interferes with until it works. You may or may not be willing to live with what's left. Dragon seems a more robust program, but is far more costly.
Rating: 
Summary: Cheap Microphone
Review: Watch out. The reviews that I had read before buying this product claimed that it came with a Plantronics DSP-300 stereo headset microphone but when I recieved it a cheap Andrea NC-61 was included. I paid the extra money believing I would recieve a quality microphone. For this reason alone I gave it a one star rating. I returned the product for a refund.
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