Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 Preferred Review Hire a Secretary for $200 Eric Grevstad
Mon 4/28/03 -- It's appropriate that ScanSoft, the office software company best known for its OmniPage optical character recognition program, should be the vendor to pick up the pioneering Dragon NaturallySpeaking when its previous seller self-destructed a couple of years ago. Just as a printed page imported into your word processor via OCR usually arrives with a few minor typos, but still saves plenty of time compared to retyping the page manually, NaturallySpeaking's speech recognition isn't perfect, but can still make a slow typist much more productive. And with version 7, Dragon's dictation accuracy climbs from impressive to remarkable.
Like previous editions, NaturallySpeaking 7 is available in a handful of different packages. Most users will wind up choosing between the $200 Preferred package tested here and the $100 Standard version: The $60 Essentials starter kit is too skimpy, lacking optimized support for applications other than AOL, Internet Explorer, and Dragon's own WordPad-level word processor, while the $700 Professional (and $1,000 Legal or Medical) versions are too pricey for most buyers to justify their added macro scripting, support for multiple specialized vocabularies, and Outlook and PowerPoint shortcuts.
The Standard package is worth a look if you anticipate using speech recognition mostly to dictate word processing documents (it supports Word 97/2000/2002 and WordPerfect 10). But users serious about keeping their hands off the keyboard should head straight for NaturallySpeaking 7 Preferred, which adds not only Excel and Outlook Express support but the ability to play back your dictation; text-to-speech reading of selected text in a synthesized voice; and the option of transcribing voice notes saved on a handheld digital recorder or (new in this version) a Pocket PC PDA. It also lets you create your own dictation commands, such as saying "Legal disclaimer" to type three paragraphs of boilerplate text.
Slap on a Headset and Start Talking
In addition to boasting 15 percent higher accuracy than version 6, ScanSoft says, NaturallySpeaking 7 lets you begin dictation in as little as five minutes -- the time it takes to set up a user profile or introduce the program to the sound of your voice. (The software is licensed for a single user, but you're permitted to install it on both work and home or desktop and laptop PCs as long as you don't share it with anyone.)
We found the real-world installation time to be more like 10 to 15 minutes, but that's still far quicker and less tiresome than the 45 minutes or more of adjusting sound levels and reading sample passages we've experienced with some speech-recognition programs. Frankly, however, setup was still the most frustrating part of the process -- while the program offers a good variety of short sample texts to read aloud, the on-screen prompt or moving arrow stuck repeatedly, making us read a sentence a second or even a third time before moving on. On the positive side, the 14-step, learn-by-doing tutorial is painless and helpful.
Power users will also want to invest in a better noise-canceling microphone (alas, PC audio input is still nowhere near ready for casual chat into a desk-mounted mic, especially if you work in a shared office or cubicle with background noise). NaturallySpeaking 7 Preferred comes with an Emkay half-headset -- a boom mic and single earphone -- that works adequately, but felt cheaper than the Plantronics or Parrott headsets we've seen in previous PC speech bundles. Sound playback is hissy, and the flexible boom feels flimsy when you bend the microphone into its proper position near the corner of your mouth.
A new Vocabulary Optimizer offers to analyze your Word, WordPerfect, RTF, and text documents and Outlook or Outlook Express e-mails to analyze your writing style. We were warned that the process would take five to 30 minutes, so were surprised when it took hardly a heartbeat -- it turns out the default setting looks for files only in the My Documents folder, which we don't use. You can manually specify folders or files for Dragon to scan later.
