Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12.5 Premium review

Software

6 Dec 2013

K.G. Orphanides

Our Rating :

Price when reviewed : £96

inc VAT

This accurate speech-to-text tool is powerful and accurate enough to change the way you work for the better

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When using NaturallySpeaking 12.5 Premium, we found ourselves carefully composing our thoughts before speaking. Even if you do dictate off-the-cuff, it’s relatively easy to select and change sentences. This is also handy if you misspeak or if background conversation gets picked up by accident. With just a few spoken commands, you can navigate through text to highlight, modify or remove erroneous phrases or just delete the last few words you spoke.

You can even tell the program to select words and phrases, delete them, and replace them with something more suitable. If the program’s vocabulary isn’t wide enough, you can train it to recognise new words. This is particularly useful for trademarks, brand names and company names. As an editing tool, it makes you think about the spoken rather than written word. This can result in baggier copy, but it also tends to produce text that sounds truly natural to your inner ear. As we grew more accustomed to the software, we found we could generate text quicker by speaking to the computer than we could by typing.

Dragon’s default behaviour is to record your speech to a dictation box and then transfer it to the document on which you’re working. However, you can disable the dictation box and simply have everything you say appear directly in any application, such as a chat program or Windows’ Command Prompt.

You can also use the system to control the Chrome, IE and Firefox browsers. This gives you extra commands, such as a “send email” command that works with popular webmail services such as Gmail. You can also scroll web pages and navigate using voice commands for the Back and Forward buttons. However, the extension that allows Chrome to be controlled sometimes crashed.

CONCLUSION

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is an outstanding piece of software. If you’re unable to type or prefer to dictate, Dragon provides a natural-feeling alternative to a keyboard that makes it easy to compose documents and control your PC. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12.5 Premium is a great Business Buy.