Accurate speech recognition has always demanded the most powerful PC hardware available, so Dragon benefits more than most applications from today's muscle-bound yet affordable systems: For most programs whose side-of-the-box official requirements list a 500MHz Pentium III (or AMD compatible) processor with 128MB of memory, we'd tell you to double that, but for NaturallySpeaking we're tempted to triple it.
That said, on our admittedly ample Windows XP desktop -- a 2.53GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB of DDR266 and an 80GB hard disk -- Dragon delivered snappy performance, keeping up with (actually, in real time, keeping roughly one sentence behind) our casually rapid conversation and not complaining about either processing power or the system's low-cost, integrated sound card (16-bit, 11KHz, monaural Sound Blaster-compatible audio will do).
NaturallySpeaking normally occupies a toolbar you dock at the top or bottom of your display, though we found we needed its vocabulary-word-training or -adding features rarely enough that we switched to its smallest incarnation, a system-tray icon that you click to turn on the microphone. (You can turn the latter off by saying Microphone off, or pause it -- while you answer a phone call, say -- with Go to sleep and Wake up, but you obviously can't turn on a switched-off mic just by talking into it.)
As you speak, your words and commands appear in a little yellow window in the toolbar a moment before they're typed into your word processor or other application. Unlike the earliest speech-recognition programs, Dragon works best if you rattle on in your normal voice, making no effort to pause ... between ... words or enunciate robotically. Rather, it uses pauses for first-class, nearly faultless distinctions between dictated text and punctuation (Please call me at your earliest convenience, semicolon, I look forward to hearing from you, period) and commands (Delete previous word. Select paragraph. Cut that. Paste that.). If you're fussy, you can switch the program into explicit dictation, command, number entry, or spelling modes.
Say What?
We were impressed -- truly, better than impressed -- with NaturallySpeaking 7's accuracy. It was nearly perfect with proper names and when formatting dates and dollar amounts. It knew SUV. It capitalized Super Bowl. It initially turned Amelia, our small cat into Amelio, our small-cap (a former Apple annual report?), but didn't miss a beat as we veered from a routine business letter (Here are the fourth-quarter sales figures) into stream-of-consciousness nonsense (The next phase of our plan for world domination involves making microwave popcorn in sufficient capacities to fill every cathedral and post office box in the western United States).
If you see an error, you simply say Select or Correct followed by the word or three in question. NaturallySpeaking 7 highlights the incorrect text, letting you say Delete that, Spell that [one letter at a time], or simply dictate (i.e., type over) it.
Or, more often than not, you'll say Choose 1 or Choose 2 to accept one of the suggestions in a pop-up Quick Correct box. The latter does a very smart -- and over time, almost psychic -- job of anticipating your corrections, as in the screen shot above when we paused to correct the slurred the winter with for the winter. (If it guesses wrong, simply ignore the box and it'll vanish.)
When you combine what we'd judge as Dragon's 90- to 95-percent accuracy with 80-odd-percent accuracy in Quick Correct suggestions, suddenly PC dictation starts seeming awfully viable as an everyday input tool. And if you're willing to invest a little time, the program offers plenty of options for fine-tuning and tweaking its understanding of your voice.
There are other neat, near-addictive conveniences to be found, such as NaturallySpeaking 7's ability to learn the names in your Outlook Express address book (just say Launch Outlook Express, new message, [name] and you're underway), or the fun of saying Click [link text] to jump to a Web-page link in Internet Explorer -- although otherwise browsing or navigating between pages not on your Favorites list is an awkward job of spelling out URLs, saying Go back, and so on. And while it lacks the Professional version's scripting language and macro recording, the Preferred package does make it easy to create new commands or voice abbreviations for frequently used insertions.
Realistic But Raised Expectations
That's not to say NaturallySpeaking 7 attains science-fiction levels of perfect, voice-controlled computing. The new version's "auto punctuation" feature, designed to insert commas and periods as you speak, didn't thrill us -- it inserts too many periods and not enough commas, and you still have to say question mark, exclamation mark, and so on anyway.
The feature introduced in version 6 to filter out ah, um, and er interjections didn't always work. Dragon fared much better with Word, WordPerfect, and WordPad than with our favorite, little-known shareware word processor -- with the latter, it often forgot to capitalize the first word in a new sentence.
While the ability to hear yourself read back your own dictation is a plus, ScanSoft's touted RealSpeak text-to-speech synthesizer, far from being a natural-sounding voice, is merely the least robotic of several robotic choices (one "female natural voice" sounded like Harvey Fierstein doing Marlon Brando as the Godfather). Spoken commands for cursor and mouse movement are so unwieldy as to be almost unusable. And maybe once or twice per page, you'll bog down in a loop of making a correction, then correcting the correction, flailing through a fourth or fifth try and saying Scratch that more often than a poison-ivy patient.
Still, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 Preferred is the real deal, a productivity package that proves PC dictation is ready for the mainstream (or at least one that knocks IBM's ViaVoice 10 back to a very distant second place). The sentence that appeared most often in our dictation? Hey, it worked!
