Dragon NaturallySpeaking: Version 10 Professional, Initial Comments

Setting up Dragon Naturally Speaking Version 10 Professional has been interesting. I have installed it on my old Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop. My processor speed is a 1.9 GHz and I have 1 GB of RAM. I am running windows XP professional. This barely qualifies for the minimum standards for this latest version of Dragon. Nuance requires a minimum standard of 1 GHz processor speed and 512 of RAM. They suggest better performance occurs with a 2.6GHz processor or a 1.6 dual core processor and at least 1GB of RAM. Because my computer is so dated, Dragon has disabled some of the command properties that I would commonly use. According to the messages, this is necessary to allow my dictation to be displayed in a timely fashion. The Nuance promotional literature talks about how speech will be printed almost immediately with a computer that is equipped with a faster processor and more RAM.

In several weeks, I will also be installing Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical Version 10 and reviewing it for everyone. Unfortunately, my tablet computer where I will install this program is a Motion 1600. That means that the processor is only 1.5 GHz. I have 1.5 GB of RAM so hopefully that will help speed the dictation process. Dragon works primarily in the RAM so having more RAM means better processing speed. Dragon does not really work from the hard drive.

Already, while writing this article, I can see that I must enable the newly disabled natural commands for Microsoft Word. Not having the Microsoft word commands available has made it frustrating to move around in this, my first document spoken with the freshly installed Dragon.

Hi, I’m back. A small period of time has passed because I have gone into the tools section of Dragon and made some changes. I have now enabled the commands for Microsoft word and I am now able to speech navigate in the manner I have always used. I am not noticing a slowdown in text display, but I will let you know if I find this happening overall.

The Nuance folder is taking up 231 MB of space. I was required to install a C++ program from the DVD before it would begin to install Dragon Naturally Speaking version 10. I do not know if adding this small program will be necessary on everyone’s installation. The amount of time involved for this installation appeared a little bit longer than previous versions.

I have deleted all my previous information from Dragon Naturally Speaking version 9 including user files and words I have added to the vocabulary editor. For all of you who have never used Dragon, I thought it would be best to start fresh and see how well it worked from day one.

At this point in the document, I have had five corrections. My word count is 264 words. That works out to approximately one correction for every 50 words. This is approximately 98% efficiency right out of the box with only seven minutes of reading and then creating a user file. (Unfortunately, I wrote this before rewriting some sections. The word count is now different. I felt it was important, at the time, to have a realistic description of how accurate Dragon was out of the box.)

Say what you want about speech recognition, but 98% accuracy right out of the box is amazing! I am using the Revolabs xTag wireless microphone. If you can remember my review, I found the microphone to be fairly accurate in an environment that is extremely quiet. Any external noise reduced the accuracy of this microphone.

In several weeks, two writers from Gottabemobile have agreed to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10 professional for the first time. Another Gottabemobile staff writer will be using the Vista Speech Recognition system. I have persuaded all of them to use speech recognition as a primary input on a frequent basis for several weeks. I am hoping that the speech recognition process is so intuitive, that they will find it as helpful and as easy to operate as I do. (I sure hope this future demonstration works well!)

So what would you like to know about Dragon Professional Version 10? I will try to find answers to any questions that you ask!