Dragon NaturallySpeaking Essentials 6

Rating:
Summary: Amazing and easy = Amazingly easy! :-)
Review: 5 days ago I opened the package at 5:00 p.m. By 6:00 p.m. the program & mike/headphone had been installed, I had begun to train the computer by reading several short paragraphs and, hands-free, I created a document in WordPerfect. This was before I opened the manual. Since then, using the program, I have opened and closed programs, saved files, chatted on Yahoo, read and sent email, surfed the net, modified web pages and created handouts.

Initially it takes time - since it is best to correct as you go - but the more I use it, fewer corrections need to be made.
Every time that I use the program it gets smarter about how I speak. The Quick Reference card is clear, fairly comprehensive and easy to understand.

I was recently diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome and was told that my use of the computer would have to be extremely limited for some time to come. After researching the various voice-recognitions programs available I chose this one because it appeared to be no-frill and was reasonably priced. I figured that it would be a good place to start and that I could upgrade or go to another program if this did not work out for me. I am looking no further. Though I haven't finished the manual yet, using the computer is almost completely hands-free. Now I can use the computer more than I did before! What more could a gal ask? Next week I am thinking of asking it if it can do my windows.

I highly recommend this program.

Rating:
Summary: The worst customer service
Review: Apparently, they purposely donft give you the CD key when you buy the software so that you will have to use up your only free incident in order to get it.

And, of course, you have to call long distance and wait in a queue for something that should have come in the box.

And donft bother to ask for this to not count as your only free incident. Apparently, they are prepared for that request.

Rating:
Summary: The worst customer service
Review: Apparently, they purposely donft give you the CD key when you buy the software so that you will have to use up your only free incident in order to get it.

And, of course, you have to call long distance and wait in a queue for something that should have come in the box.

And donft bother to ask for this to not count as your only free incident. Apparently, they are prepared for that request.

Rating:
Summary: Best speech recognition software around...
Review: I bought this software recently and was pretty skeptical about speech recognition capabilities in general. After using Dragon 6 I really changed my mind. Not only the speech technology is very efficient but the software also has a lot of functionalities to drive your computer by using speech.

When you buy the software don't get confused with Dragon 5.0 which is the old version and which has nothing to do with the capabilities of Dragon 6.0. Dragon 6 is also way better that IBM Via Voice that I tried at a friend's place. Anyway, Scansoft the maker of Dragon 6.0 is the leading speech software company so you can't be wrong. One thing: the training of the software is very quick and easy.

Rating:
Summary: A DREAM COME TRUE FOR PARALYZED LIKE ME
Review: I HAVE USED DRAGON SINCE ABOUT 1989. THEY WERE MAKING IT FIRST FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME WHO CAN'T USE THEIR HANDS, I'M PARALYZED. IT TYPES 180 WORDS PER MIN. THEY ARE THE FIRST SO THEY ARE THE BEST BUT GET THE DRAGON DICTATE PREFERRED EDITION IT IS FASTER AND MORE FLEXIBLE. IF U DONT LOVE IT - DONT BUY WHAT I SAY ANYMORE ...IF U DO SEND ME A THANK YOU BY GIVING A DONATION TO CCI.. MY DOG HELPER ORG. CANINE COMPANIONS FOR INDEPENDENCE.
JIM KISTNER
[e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Promise Not Yet Fulfilled
Review: I purchased this product for my 9-year-old daughter to make it easier for her to get started on her creative writing. She went through the required voice recognition training program. Once she began to dictate, the computer wrote gibberish. I had her train the program some more; it still wrote gibberish. In case the problem was her child's voice or problems with her reading skills during the training process, I signed on as a new reader and tried to train the program to recognize my voice. It did better than it did with my daughter, but it still made a lot of errors. I suppose this product might work if you're willing to invest a significant amount of time on voice recognition training, but it requires more than we have the time and patience for. This is NOT an "open the box and get started right away" type of product.

By the way, it's advertised as being compatible with Windows ME, but it didn't work on my daughter's computer (even though it had the minimum system requirements). I had to load it onto my newer Windows XP machine.

Perhaps this program works for those who are willing to put in the time it takes to develop accuracy in voice recognition, but for now I consider the technology to be a promise that has yet to be fulfilled.

Rating:
Summary: Promise Not Yet Fulfilled
Review: I purchased this product for my 9-year-old daughter to make it easier for her to get started on her creative writing. She went through the required voice recognition training program. Once she began to dictate, the computer wrote gibberish. I had her train the program some more; it still wrote gibberish. In case the problem was her child's voice or problems with her reading skills during the training process, I signed on as a new reader and tried to train the program to recognize my voice. It did better than it did with my daughter, but it still made a lot of errors. I suppose this product might work if you're willing to invest a significant amount of time on voice recognition training, but it requires more than we have the time and patience for. This is NOT an "open the box and get started right away" type of product.

By the way, it's advertised as being compatible with Windows ME, but it didn't work on my daughter's computer (even though it had the minimum system requirements). I had to load it onto my newer Windows XP machine.

Perhaps this program works for those who are willing to put in the time it takes to develop accuracy in voice recognition, but for now I consider the technology to be a promise that has yet to be fulfilled.

Rating:
Summary: Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 6 is better than 7!
Review: I was a satisfied user of version 6 (preferred) and thought I would be even happier with version 7. Bix mistake! As far as I am concerned, version 6 (preferred) is excellent.

I made the mistake of assuming the version 7 would upgrade the existing version 6 on my computer. It didn't. It installed version 7 in a different directory. Worse yet, error messages appeared. Reinstalling the program did not help. Uninstalling version 6 was no longer possible after version 7 was installed. Manually removing version 6 did not help. Fortunately I had a backup of my harddrive. I was able to return to the way things were before. I then uninstalled version 6 and it did a clean install a version 7. That solved the error messages. However, other problems with the new software remain.

I would have thought that some attention would be paid to grammatical structure when it would automatically insert a period or a comma. It does not insert comma's or periods in a very consistent way. This makes this new feature essentially useless.

Aside from this, unlike version 6, version 7 has caused some instability in my XP home edition system, leading to repeated crashes while executing "select that" and "correct that" commands. Fortunately, with Windows XP, the computer reboots after a crash. But you lose information in the process. My computer crashed three times while trying to write this section with Dragon version 7. I am now typing instead of dictating.

When doing a "correct that" command, new bugs became evident. It sometimes inserts the correction for the highlighted phrase into the middle of a previous word in a sentence. When I paused, it sometimes did not leave a space between the previous word and the next phrase. So some words remained connected likethis. Very irritating!

It would have been nice if there had been clear directions how to transfer custom words from the dictionary of version 6 to version 7. Now I have lost all the work I put into version 6. I subsequently put in hours of work inserting special terms into version 7's dictionary. However, with all the new problems associated with version 7, unless I find a solution I think I will go back to version 6, necessitating new work again.

Moral of the story as far as I am concerned: stay with version 6 (which worked fine for me) unless you are capable of dealing with a lot of frustration and able to resolve quirky issues like the ones I have run into.

Rating:
Summary: Easy to Install, easy to use, good results!
Review: I was not sure of the quality of this software when I first bought it. I used other voice-typing programs in the past, and I have to tell you that nothing measures up to Dragon NaturallySpeaking Essentials 6!!! It was easy to install, not too difficult to master, and had great results. The speech formatting software-to recongnize indiviual speakers- was great! I think that overall, it was a great buy! I recomend it to anyone with some free time and a little bit of patience!

Rating:
Summary: Long time computer user
Review: I've been using computers for over 30 years now and the speech recognition of Dragon is one of the best, innovative ideas that I've seen for the industry in a long time.

When I have a lot of word processing or data entry work to do, the ability to just talk and have the text appear on the screen at 150+ wpm is very effective. Sure there are a few errors, but I make typos often as well, so its about a push.

Speech recognition will be a big factor in our future lives in many, many ways, not just for entering text. Commands to cars, cell phones, appliances, etc. will all come to fruition in the next few years.