Has anyone tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking software?

[zippy1]

A friend uses Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice to text software and is willing to let me borrow it if it might help me (I'm just starting my business and hope to include transcription in my services). Has anyone used this program?

[Office Goddess]

I love, love, love it! I have arthritis and started using Dragon about 5 years ago - can't live without it! It was about 95% accurate 'out of the box' and, since I have been 'training' it for 5 years, it is nearly perfect now.

[MrsAn]

I also have this software! My husband and I purchaced it when he needed to "transcribe" a chapter book for EMT training to paper so he could email it to himself to study it at work ....without being caught studying for a different job with a giant book infront of him....please don't ask....but regardless...I LOVE IT! You can even talk out your emails, make it work to open different programs on your computer an so one!

I believe that the one I bought has only one user agreement....but I give it a 9 out of 10 stars

[Verbal Aesthetics]

It is fairly good, but I have to admit that I didn't "train" it as best I could ( I was excited to get started!). I'm a fast talker, and it picks up most of what I say. The "typos" can be pretty funny...nothing like a little comedic relief during the workday!

[dawndmd]

One of my attorney clients uses it. He is in the training process so I do get some funny things in the legal pleadings sometimes lol, like hairy for harry.

[Top KoalaT]

I personally haven't used it. When I took a class in Speech Recognition about seven years ago, it was very frustrating, and I never could "train" it to know my voice well enough. I told the instructor that I could type MUCH faster than I could ever use speech recognition.

However, I know someone that sells the medical version of Dragon to doctors. He had a program on his iphone and it recognized what I said without any training...very impressive.

[jeanetteb]

So, has this software improved over the years? I had a transcriber on my team years ago who used this on a client's project (instead of doing the transcribing herself) and it was awful! She got fired, we had to redo the whole transcript and give the client a discount to boot.

[Office Goddess]

So, has this software improved over the years? I had a transcriber on my team years ago who used this on a client's project (instead of doing the transcribing herself) and it was awful! She got fired, we had to redo the whole transcript and give the client a discount to boot.

Oh, yeah! The software is now about 95% accurate 'out-of-the-box.' And for the record, if the transcriber wasn't paying attention to what was being typed, she SHOULD HAVE been fired!

[FlintVS]

I do a lot of transcription, and I've often thought about using Dragon Naturally Speaking to speed up that particular task, as well as take some of the wear and tear off my wrists. Knowing how much more accurate it is now, I may just try it.

[The Perfect Word]

I still don't think it could do a good job on recordings unless they were extremely clear, no background noise, static, etc. Has anyone actually tried it with recordings, especially ones that have less-than-optimal audio and must be transcribed verbatim (ums, uhs, etc., included)? Or recordings with more than one speaker? I'm thinking the newest version might do well on a single-person recording that was clear, but other than that...?

Pam