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Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 does a much better job of punctuating my sentences properly, especially with regard to quotations and capitalizing the beginning of sentences. So far, the biggest difference between the premium version and the professional version that I have noticed is the ability for the professional version to create macros. Dragon Home v15 speech recognition helps you get more done on your PC by voice. Dictate documents, send email, search the web, and more. Designed using Nuance Deep Learning technology, it delivers up to 99% recognition accuracy, adapts to different accents, and even works in noisy environments.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is an advanced system for turning speech into text. You are supposed to be able to just start talking and it will transcribe your words instantly into accurate text. It can even recognize big words, and hard to spell words, speeding up the process of getting text onto a page. But does it really work like it’s shown to?
Overview
Dragon is the most popular mainstream voice recognition software on the market, and is designed to allow you to free up your hands so you don’t have to type. When you see it in action it’s pretty impressive, the person starts talking and words quickly follow. When compared to typing it’s clear to see the advantage in just speaking and having your words show up automatically. Especially if you have any sort of disability that prevents you from using a keyboard or a mouse.
The Claim
They claim that using their software is fast, fun, and more convenient than typing or using a mouse. By just talking to your computer, and having it follow your commands, and turning your text into words, their claim is that you can get more done, with less effort, and in less time.
They say that speaking is many times faster than typing. What we discovered though, is that by the time you go back and make the corrections, either by using the software or with the keyboard and mouse, the time is about the same.
The Hype
Many people say Dragon has helped them speed up their article writing, or their paper writing, and medical transcription seems to be one of its uses. There isn’t really any other voice software on the market that gets as much attention.
The Cost
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is marketed to individuals, businesses, and the healthcare industry, and comes with different price tags depending on which type you go with. For individuals the prices start at $100 for the Home edition and twice that for the premium edition. If you go the business route they have customized solutions for whatever industry you’re in, and they want you to contact them to get an idea of how they can help you, and a personalized quote.
The Commitment
You definitely have to put the time in to training the software to get used to your way of saying different words. This can be pretty boring and involves speaking samples of text for several minutes per training session. The accuracy is supposed to improve the more you train it, so if you want to have a less aggravating time with it, it’s recommended to train it as much as you can.
Evaluation
Dragon Naturally Speaking claims to work well right out of the box, but even this requires a few minutes of training. Once you finish that it starts generating text from the words that you speak, which can be pretty mesmerizing when you first use it.
The biggest pro is that this provides instant relief to tired hands, fingers, and wrists if you do a lot of typing for your job, or as an author. The con is that you will now be using your voice mostly, and your voice can wear out just like your hands and fingers. You also have to get used to putting your thoughts into spoken words, which is different than staying silent and just typing what you’re thinking.
The software works best when you make complete sentences spoken in a natural voice. But, it can be hard to formulate full sentences in your head and speak them all in one go without chopping them up. Usually what ends up happening is you say a few words and then see if it got it right, and then you say a few more words.
Another pro is that with the premium package you can speak into a voice recorder and Dragon NaturallySpeaking will transcribe that for you into a text file. Then you just have to go through and make sure they got it right, making corrections and edits instead of using it line by line directly.
They have settings you can use that will automatically punctuate sentences for you, like adding commas and periods, but this seems to still be in its early stages and get it wrong most of the time. This means you’ll have to say the word comma when you want one in the word period when you want to end a sentence.
Getting It Wrong
No matter how accurate they claim it to be, Dragon will habitually get words wrong, especially particles, which can make a sentence sound wrong, or be completely opposite if it leaves out a “not” or puts “has” instead of “hasn’t”. While it may be true that speaking is much faster than typing, by the time you go back and correct all of the mistakes that the software makes, and read through everything you’ve just typed to make sure that it’s accurate, you could have just typed it once, corrected your typos as you go, and be done.
Homonym Trouble
There’s really no easy fix to the problem that Dragon has with homonyms. They’re their there is almost an impossibility for it, although it will usually get them right if you speak the sentence fast enough, based on the context.
Final Dragon Naturally Speaking Review
Dragon is fun to use, mostly because of the novelty of seeing your spoken words show up as text nearly instantly. For important projects, or for business when you just can’t make mistake, it’s too unreliable to be able to used as they show it being used.
If you invest the time needed to train the software, and if you focus on what you’re doing while you’re doing it, correcting the mistakes when it makes them, it can be useful, and take the strain off your fingers and wrists.
Those with disabilities will find that the software is indeed helpful in using many features of the computer without the need of a mouse or keyboard. However, this will still require a lot of training and getting used to the different commands it comes pre-loaded with.
Our Recommendation
Dragon is pretty fun software, but don’t expect to be able to rely on it entirely for all of your typing needs. It makes too many mistakes to be used for things like instant messages, important schoolwork or business emails. For things that are less important, it can be fun to get your computer to do things, like search on Google or post to Facebook just using your voice. Whether that novelty is worth the price is up to you.
What do you think? Does Dragon Naturally Speaking work or not?
| Developer(s) | Nuance Communications |
|---|---|
| Initial release | June 1997; 23 years ago |
| Stable release | 15 / September 2016; 4 years ago |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows, macOS |
| Available in | 8 languages |
| Type | Speech recognition |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | www.nuance.com |
Dragon NaturallySpeaking (also known as Dragon for PC, or DNS)[1] is a speech recognition software package developed by Dragon Systems of Newton, Massachusetts, which was acquired first by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products and later by Nuance Communications. It runs on Windowspersonal computers. Version 15 (Professional Individual and Legal Individual),[2] which supports 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7, 8 and 10, was released in August 2016.[3][4] The macOS version is called Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, version 6[5] or Dragon for Mac.
Features[edit]
Dragon NaturallySpeaking uses a minimal user interface. As an example, dictated words appear in a floating tooltip as they are spoken (though there is an option to suppress this display to increase speed), and when the speaker pauses, the program transcribes the words into the active window at the location of the cursor. (Dragon does not support dictating to background windows.) The software has three primary areas of functionality: voice recognition in dictation with speech transcribed as written text, recognition of spoken commands, and text-to-speech: speaking text content of a document. Voice profiles can be accessed by different computers in a networked environment, although the audio hardware and configuration must be identical to those of the machine generating the configuration. The Professional version allows creation of custom commands to control programs or functions not built into NaturallySpeaking.
History[edit]
Dr. James Baker laid out the description of a speech understanding system called DRAGON in 1975.[6] In 1982 he and Dr. Janet M. Baker, his wife, founded Dragon Systems to release products centered around their voice recognition prototype.[7] He was President of the company and she was CEO.
Dragon Naturally Speaking Free Trial
DragonDictate was first released for DOS, and utilized hidden Markov models, a probabilistic method for temporal pattern recognition. At the time, the hardware was not powerful enough to address the problem of word segmentation, and DragonDictate was unable to determine the boundaries of words during continuous speech input. Users were forced to enunciate one word at a time, clearly separated by a small pause after each word. DragonDictate was based on a trigram model, and is known as a discrete utterance speech recognition engine.[8]
Dragon Systems released NaturallySpeaking 1.0 as their first continuous dictation product in 1997.[9]
Joel Gould was the director of emerging technologies at Dragon Systems. Gould was the principal architect and lead engineer for the development of Dragon NaturallyOrganized (1.0), Dragon NaturallySpeaking Mobile Organizer (3.52), Dragon NaturallySpeaking (1.0 through 2.02), and DragonDictate for Windows (1.0). Gould also designed the tutorials in both DragonDictate for DOS version 2.0 and Dragon Talk.[citation needed]
The company was then purchased in June 2000 by Lernout & Hauspie, a Belgium-based corporation that was subsequently found to have been perpetrating financial fraud.[10] Following the all-share deal advised by Goldman Sachs, Lernout & Hauspie declared bankruptcy in November 2000. The deal was not originally supposed to be all stock and the unavailability of the Goldman Sachs team to advise concerning the change in terms was one of the grounds of the Bakers' subsequent lawsuit. The Bakers had received stock worth hundreds of millions of US dollars, but were only able to sell a few million dollars' worth before the stock lost all its value as a result of the accounting fraud. The Bakers sued Goldman Sachs for negligence, intentional misrepresentation and breach of fiduciary duty, which in January 2013 led to a 23-day trial in Boston. The jury cleared Goldman Sachs of all charges.[11] Following the bankruptcy of Lernout & Hauspie, the rights to the Dragon product line were acquired by ScanSoft of Burlington, Massachusetts, also a Goldman Sachs client. In 2005 ScanSoft launched a de facto acquisition of Nuance Communications, and rebranded itself as Nuance.[12]
As of 2012 LG Smart TVs include voice recognition feature powered by the same speech engine as Dragon NaturallySpeaking.[13]
Versions[edit]
| Dragon Naturally Speaking Version | Release date | Editions | Operating Systems Supported |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | April 1997 | Personal | Windows 95, NT 4.0. |
| 2.0 | November 1997 | Standard, Preferred, Deluxe | Windows 95, NT 4.0 |
| 3.0 | October 1998 | Point & Speak, Standard, Preferred, Professional (with optional Legal and Medical add-on products) | Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0. |
| 4.0 | August 4, 1999 | Essentials, Standard, Preferred, Professional, Legal, Medical, Mobile | Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0 SP3+. |
| 5.0 | August 2000 | Essentials, Standard, Preferred, Professional, Legal, Medical | Windows 98, Me, NT 4.0 SP6+, 2000. |
| 6.0 | November 15, 2001 | Essentials, Standard, Preferred, Professional, Legal, Medical | |
| 7.0 | March 2003 | Essentials, Standard, Preferred, Professional, Legal, Medical | Windows 98SE, Me, NT4 SP6+, 2000, XP. |
| 8.0 | November 2004 | Essentials, Standard, Preferred, Professional, Legal, Medical | Windows Me (Only Standard and Preferred editions), Windows 2000 SP4+, Windows XP SP1+. |
| 9.0 | July 2006 | Standard, Preferred, Professional, Legal, Medical, SDK client, SDK server, | Windows 2000 SP4+, XP SP1+. |
| 9.5 | January 2007 | Standard, Preferred, Professional, Legal, Medical, SDK client, SDK server | Windows 2000 SP4+, XP SP1+, Vista (32-bit). |
| 10.0 | August 7, 2008 | Essentials, Standard, Preferred, Professional, Legal, Medical | Windows 2000 SP4+, XP SP2+ (32-bit), Vista (32-bit). Server 2003. |
| 10.1 | March 2009 | Standard, Preferred, Professional, Legal, Medical | Windows 2000 SP4+, XP SP2+ (32-bit), Vista (32-bit and 64-bit), Windows 7 (32 and 64-bit). Server 2003. |
| 11.0 | August 2010 | Home, Premium, Professional, Legal | Windows XP SP2+ (32-bit), Vista SP1+ (32-bit and 64-bit), 7 (32 and 64-bit). Server 2003, 2008. |
| 11.0 | 2011 | SDK client (DSC), SDK server (DSS) | Windows XP SP2+ (32-bit only), Vista SP1+ (32-bit and 64-bit), Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit), Windows Server 2003 and 2008, SP1, SP2 and R2 (32-bit and 64-bit) |
| 11.5 | June 2011 | Home, Premium, Professional, Legal | Windows XP SP2+ (32-bit), Vista SP1+ (32-bit and 64-bit), 7 (32 and 64-bit). Server 2003, 2008. |
| 11.0 | August 2011 | Medical (Dragon Medical Practice Edition) | Windows XP SP2+ (32-bit), Vista SP1+ (32-bit and 64-bit), 7 (32 and 64-bit). Server 2003, 2008. |
| 12.0 | October 2012 | Home, Premium, Professional, Legal | Windows XP SP3+ (32-bit), Vista SP2+ (32-bit and 64-bit), 7 (32 and 64-bit), 8 (32 and 64-bit). Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012. |
| 12.5 | February 2013 | Home, Premium, Professional, Legal | Windows XP SP3+ (32-bit), Vista SP2+ (32-bit and 64-bit), 7 (32 and 64-bit), 8 (32 and 64-bit). Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012. |
| 12 | June 2013 | Medical (Dragon Medical Practice Edition 2) | Windows XP SP3+ (32-bit), Vista SP2+ (32-bit and 64-bit), 7 (32 and 64-bit), 8 (32 and 64-bit). Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012. |
| 13 | August 2014 | Home, Premium, Professional, and Legal. | 7 (32 and 64-bit), 8.1 (32 and 64-bit). Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012. Mac OS X 10.6+ (Intel Processor) |
| 13 | September 2015 | Medical (UK, French, German) (Dragon Medical Practice Edition 3) | 7 (32 and 64-bit), 8.1 (32 and 64-bit), 10 (32 and 64-bit). Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012. Mac OS X 10.6+ (Intel Processor) |
| 14 | September 2015 | Professional (individual, and Group) | 7 (32 and 64-bit), 8.1 (32 and 64-bit), 10 (32 and 64-bit). Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012. Mac OS X 10.6+ (Intel Processor). Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012. |
| 15 | August 16, 2016 | Dragon Professional Individual; Dragon Legal Individual; Dragon Professional Individual for Mac (version 6) | |
| 15 | May 1, 2017 | Dragon Professional Group (Languages: English US and German only) | |
| 15 | January 22, 2018 | Dragon Medical Practice Edition 4 (Languages: English US) |
Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 is available in the following languages: UK English, US English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Japanese (aka 'Dragon Speech 11' in Japan).
Cost Of Dragon Naturally Speaking
See also[edit]
Notes[edit]
References[edit]
Dragon Naturally Speaking Costo
- ^Sarnataro, Valerie (2012-11-08). 'Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS) 12 Review'. technologyguide.com. Technology Guide. Retrieved 2013-07-25.
- ^'Nuance Announces Major New Releases of Dragon for Windows and Mac OS X'. Retrieved 2016-08-22.
- ^'Nuance product support for Microsoft Windows Vista'. Archived from the original on 2009-12-15. Retrieved 2009-12-15.
- ^'Nuance product support for Microsoft Windows 7'. 2010. Retrieved 16 Aug 2010.
- ^'Nuance Announces Major New Releases of Dragon for Windows and Mac OS X'. 2016. Retrieved 2016-08-22.
- ^Baker, James K. (1975). 'The DRAGON System - An Overview'. IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. 23 (1): 24–29. doi:10.1109/TASSP.1975.1162650.
- ^'History of Speech Recognition and Transcription Software'. Retrieved 2013-07-12.
- ^'DragonDictate product information'. Retrieved 2010-02-03.
- ^'Dragon NaturallySpeaking 1.0 released'. Retrieved 2010-02-03.
- ^'Dragon Systems purchased by Lernout & Hauspie'. New York Times. 2001-05-07. Retrieved 2010-02-03.
- ^'Goldman Is Cleared Over a Sale Gone Awry'. New York Times. 2013-01-23. Retrieved 2013-01-23.
- ^'ScanSoft and Nuance to Merge'. 2005-05-09. Archived from the original on 2010-05-28. Retrieved 2010-02-03.
- ^'Samsung and LG smart TVs share your voice data behind the fine print'. ConsumerReports. 2015-02-09. Retrieved 2016-06-10.
Dragon Dictation Cost
External links[edit]
- Official website for Nuance Communications
How Much Does Dragon Naturally Speaking Cost