Dragon Naturally Speaking

July 22, 2008 by Ari
Filed under Altas de Buscadores, Search Engine Optimization

If you do anything regular on your computer like typing or blogging, I highly recommend Dragon Naturally Speaking to you. I was amazed at how efficient this little program is. In the past, when I needed to write something I would have to set my mind into the writing mode and begin. In the course of things, I would begin to write as if I was being formal again like when our old high school teacher used to tell us to write in a certain manner. In other words, it really wasn’t much of me and more of what I thought was needed on paper to get my point across. With Dragon, I can just talk about whatever it is I have to say and the program writes it on my screen.

If you can type 80 words per minute, Dragon allows you to speak (and type) at 180 words a minute. In fact, I find that because I can just say what I am thinking, my conversation tends to flow better since I don’t have to stop and think about what may go well next in writing. I don’t have to pause either, I can just talk and go. I don’t even have to look at the screen while its typing for you. You can close your eyes and say what you want to and when you open them and look, there is your text on screen.

Like any other software program out there, there is a little bit of a learning aspect of it, but that is okay because while you have to learn how to use the program the program has to learn to use your speech too. When you install it, I suggest you go through the little tutorial because it will quickly show you how to get up and running but it also begns to teach the program exactly how you speak. Once that is out of the way and every time you use it, the program continues its learning curve until finally, the program can interpret your speech completely and without any effort. It took my program about seven minutes of speech to become generally accustomed to my speech pattern. All I had to do was enter some words and say them that the program would not know what they are, unless I tell it what they are like CompUSA or iTunes etc.

There is a Standard Edition and a Professional edition but honestly, I found no difference between the two unless you really want to spend more money. The Standard Edition is what I used to “say” this post and I find that when I used to post once a day, I can now post five times a day if I choose to. When you go to their website they also have it available in many international languages too, including Spanish.

In the end, it doesn’t just do speech recognition for typing purposes, it can actually learn to operate your PC by voice. I haven’t used it for that purpose, but I’m sure you will find a way to make that happen.