Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 12, English (Old Version)

I invested in a high-quality desktop mic for my computer so that I can use Dragon Naturally Speaking. However, the computer keeps telling me that the audio quality is very poor and recommends the mic be 1 to 2 inches from my face. I dont know about any of you, but my workspace is not set up so that I can have microphone an inch from my face for the entire day. I also dont want to be tethered to my desk with a headset and cord all day. the speech recognition quality actually seems to be somewhat reasonable, but the value is questionable. The biggest downside is that Dragon does not work with Microsoft Lync, which is an egregious oversight. looking online, I now see that there are articles from several years ago saying that Reagan does not work with Lync. WTF? The main reason I have carpal tunnel syndrome is because Im typing in Lync messenger all day. This was basically a waste of money.

I am shocked at how well this works! I bought it because I was diagnosed with Lyme disease, which causes a great deal of pain especially for me in my hands. This makes typing very difficult. My voice is kind of nasally and sounds awful on VoIP so I thought Dragon Naturally Speaking might not work for me. I was very wrong. Right off the start it was nearly perfect. With a few hours of voice training, which it does daily at a set time using any work I have done with it, Dragon has my voice patterns down and does not miss a word I say! I am very satisfied with this product. How difficult it was to learn? There are simple easy to follow instructions and help that made learning this software easy for me. I literally jumped right in. Installation was very simple and straight forward, I just put the disk in and selected the .exe file then I followed the simple instructions. It was done in no time and ready to go.

This review of mine is just a personal experience. Some people’s experience might be different from mine. I got this version for some time already, and I’ve only used it in the first year for a couple of reason. I put up many hours in the practice module; I even bought a sennheizer USB headset with a mic to have a better experience using it; however, the result is still subpar. Whats confusing though is that, I always do good in every practice mode, but every time I use it for my article that’s when the problem starts to happen. It’s receiving a lot of unintended words that I have to keep repeating myself over and over again. To me, the software only likes a certain kind of tone to understand the word because it can have issues when I start to speak a little bit excited or even worse such as like a conversational tone. Right now, I tried to be simple and only use an app that I bought in apple store, and it only cost me $9.99. The result is way better than my experience with the dragon software. It doesn’t even need any special headset or practice module. So to be short, my experience is just a waste of time and money.

When I received it, I experienced about 3 hours of high frustration because the included headset almost worked, but the volume of the speech was low even with max sensitivity computer setting. I went ahead anyway and the product worked very poorly - it took about 15 seconds to transcribe even a short phrase. Finally it dumped me out of the tutorial with some error message like it really could not understand what I said. I was about ready to toss it, but decided to try another headset. I tried the inexpensive Koss headset that Amazon had suggested as a bundle with the Dragon 12. Suddenly it started to work great.

I have used Dragon for a couple of years for dictation at work and find that it can greatly reduce my paperwork time. I bought the new version because my old one was becoming glitchy and I could not find the cd to reload the program. The only complaint that I have is that it does not work that well with my interface at work (EPIC) and so I will sometimes dictate it on Word and cut/paste the note into EPIC. Training can still be a hassle and when I am tired or sick I have more errors.

Started using Dragon over 10 years ago when as a court stenographer I needed a method to help with my typing. It took time to train the software and it worked pretty good. Over the years I upgraded to Dragon Level 10 and it had improved significantly. I bought the 12 Premium and it was not an improvement in my view, and recently purchased the 12 Professional and it still does not meet my standards. Simple words continue to be a problem when you dictate an, you get and, dictate on and you one, and on and on and on. I wonder how it operates with those who are neither as articulate nor enunciate clearly? Dragon gets away with it madness because its the only club in town, but its customer service really suffers because there is none and companies that depend upon computers to interact with human beings as their only line of resolving problems with their product will eventually fail. Dragon sucks every penny it can from its consumers by charging outrageous fees for live tech help when the free time ends (and thats when the system fails due to some software problem). Those who are physically challenged cannot find an alternative source, and I pray one will arise soon.

I only give three starts because, while i thought it was a good product, it did not serve me well for that i needed it to do. It would probably be better served to do memos, writing a novel however, is beyond its capability. I spend twice as much time proof reading and correcting errors as i did manually. I gave it three starts only because it is awesome concept that works on some levels. just not where i needed it to work.

Having tried this a couple times since the very beginning lets say its came along ways!! A good product that has many options and does pretty well. If compared to other software over years I would say this is at the teenage stage and maturing toward adulthood :-) In a few more years it will be normal stuff!!!

I just bought Dragon for the first time, having waited until the s/w had been around long enough to hopefully work well, and the first day I was ecstatic as the recognition works very well with my plantronics Savi headset, but noticed serious apparent interactions esp Firefox acting badly and sloooowly, and lots of firefox and excel freezes (Office 2007), so looked to Amazon reviews to verify. Sadly it is the usual software story, great initial product becomes bloatware (usually after sale to larger company) as excess new versions are developed to milk users and maintain cash flow, and company wont fund a needed rewrite from scratch. This exact thing happened with ACT over a decade, great to horrible. I think the subscription model or SAAS is best as it does not encourage version pre-release to meet revenue deadlines. Ive tried switching browser to Chrome and IE, and the conflicts resulting in slow performance and freezes crept in. This is crapware, and Im still on the fence about whether the benefits (I love taking a break from typing) outweighs how badly my computer gets messed up. Im thinking Ill try using it for email twice a day, shutting it down and restarting right after.

I have dyslexia so when I type I miss words and invert characters. DNS is an answer but has flaws. It interferes with Excel 2003 Numbers Key Pad, it inserts periods randomly where grammatically they should be commas or starts new sentences without any rational. Even with these flaws job completion is still 2-3 times faster.