Nuance Dragon Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home 13 (Old Version)

I have Amazon prime. Took two days to get here. I bought the Dragon naturally speaking home edition. Im using it now to write this review. It comes with its own microphone so no additional KOSS CS 100 microphone is needed to be bought. This one works just fine. I got KOSS CS 100. Its useless to me right now because I have a laptop with only a connection for ear plugs. My laptop does not have the insert for a Mic. It has a built-in mic. The mic that comes with the Dragon home edition is just fine. It took 45 minutes to the city to install it. You have to turn off the firewall. Once it is installed, you can turn the firewall back on. I like the program. So far so good. Ive given four star. This is not a perfect programT There are some mistakes. But, since I have only used it for an hour I hope that with time it becomes better. I have already gone to the Dragon site and registered that does not take. Hopefully, this has helped you all to decide whether to buy it or not. I say go for it. What you have to lose $34? Its a fun toy.

I read all of the reviews before buying this and the only reason why I did, in spite of the one star reviews, was because a fellow author highly recommended it to me. That said, I dont know what other people were doing, or what their computer systems are like, but this thing installed right on the first try. It took about an hour, granted, but Adobe Creative Suite takes longer than that! Its performed like a dream since installation. I dictated 1,000 words in 20 minutes with very few errors. (Thats impressive. I write fantasy.) If youre an author, and youre wanting to speed things along, I highly recommend this program. (Just make sure to buy the Blue Microphone Snowball with it. That makes a lot of difference.)

EDITED_It is working now. It took a total of 6 hours and deleting and reinstalling it three times for it to finely work. Good product just way to difficult to get to work. I suggest 1 it needs to take less then 4 gb of space and it needs to load faster. I think this product could be better. IT IS NOT WORKING. After five hours of fighting with this it is not working. My mic works. My mic works on the computer. I hear my self from the mic. I go through the dang profile thing and when it says to test your mic and I go to turn on Dragons button it stays red and not green. It will not work.

I am typing this the old fashioned way. After spending more than 30 hours trying ideas from Nuance Customer Support, user websites and YouTube videos, changing settings and even uninstalling and reinstalling the program on 2 different computers (both running Windows 10), I still have not been able to get the software to work. The frustrating thing is the microphone is working and I can use it, but not with Dragon. I get to the microphone check, see my device in the window and can speak into it and make the bars move, but when I select it and click next I get the error message: The sound system you have selected is not responding. Try selecting a different one, or check to make sure that no other application, such as Dragon Naturally Speaking, is accessing the sound system. There must be a solution for this I haven’t found, but as I am out of patience with the whole thing I will have to take a break from it. Perhaps someone will read this and be able to help me and any others who have the same issue. Update, I finally got Dragon to work, at least on my laptop. I have a new laptop that I only use for work, but I decided to see if I could set up Windows speech recognition on it, something I wasn’t able to do on my other machines. In 2 minutes I was dictating into notepad. All 3 machines run Windows 10, what’s the difference? Could it be how they got there? One computer started out as a 7 machine, the other as an 8.1. I decided to try an experiment with my 8.1 machine. First, I installed a clean version of Windows 10 (which erases everything on your computer), then I set up speech recognition and confirmed it was working. After that I reinstalled Dragon and all my other software. Took the whole day, but it works. I am not recommending this course of action to anyone else as I am not the brightest bulb in the sign when it comes to computers. I’m sure there was an easier solution to my problem, but I went the long way around to discover if you can’t get Windows speech recognition to work, Dragon won’t work either. Anyway, I went through the Naturally Speaking tutorial, then dictated a couple pieces of my writing and got surprising accuracy. Nothing close to perfect, but far fewer mistakes than I anticipated. I originally gave this a 1 star review, but I would up it to 3 stars now.

First one I ordered didnt work, refused to download from the disc. Returned it to Amazon and requested a new package. Was skeptical if it would work after reading all of the negative reviews of this product. Once the new disc arrived, it took awhile to load it onto my computer but once it was installed I have been pleasantly surprised and actually quite thrilled with how it works. Now this isnt a product that you just quickly install and use if you want to use all of its features and I am still learning about it, but I do a lot of reports for attorneys and I am very pleased with the product. Its accuracy so far is adequate for my needs although I still do some typing corrections, but like I said Im still learning the program and it will take awhile for me to learn the program and for the program to learn the vocabulary that I use and the report format that the attorneys require of me, but I am pleasantly surprised. I would only purchase it from Amazon due to the return policy that Amazon has. First one didnt work, second one works fine, doesnt lock my computer, doesnt affect any other programs. Only drawback I see right now is that the microphone picks up background music so when youre pausing to gather your thoughts and your playing music (Im old, so I like oldies music) I get Neil Diamond or the Beatles lyrics being typed so thats a bit of a bummer but otherwise very pleased with this product.

Ive used three previous versions of Dragon (8,10 and 12), and was pretty lukewarm about those. But with 13 Home (and maybe with 12.5), theres some kind of corner that the recognition engine has made, and now its much more accurate, with relatively little training. Ive tried it on both my Windows 7 laptop and Windows 10 desktop with amazing results, where free flowing text is 90+ percent accurate, and often whole paragraphs are mistake-free. I did purchase a higher quality USB microphone, but even the unit that came with the CD was pretty accurate. However, my focus is on first drafts of longer emails, notes, and transcribing hand-written fiction into a computer document. I can easily churn out 1000 words in 10 minutes, spend one or two minutes manually correcting things, and its done. A great time saver. If expanding the use of the product to perform more detailed tasks or control your computer, then the expectations need to be adjusted. Its going to take more time to train it, and learn the limitations, with much more time necessary for the proper learning curve. I have not yet tried anything to complicated, but at least this version is going to allow me that option. Previous versions I just got frustrated with simple drafts.

After loading I get email telling me about new Home 14 or 15. I was ticked off. Started using Dragon when first came on market the newer versions don’t take down your words down any better, just seems to do more stuff that make program over bloated. But for you it might just be perfect.

Im dictating this review so you can get a sense of how accurate it actually can be. I usually need to make at least two or three minor corrections in one short paragraph. Dragon is a godsend for people who really have problems with their arms and cant type or input text the usual way. Dragon 13 does seem to be a improvement over Dragon 12; theres a considerable uptake in speed. A huge problem remains that it is practically dysfunctional in Microsoft Word. I use the dictation box or pad and then copy and paste my text into my word file. I did not have any particular problems with the installation, beyond the fact that it took a very long time (a few hours). Dictating this review, there was one major error: Dragon typed men instead of improvement. However, Dragon is typing the words almost as quickly as I can say them. I like that a lot.

Works great. Ive even used it to voice command Assassins Creed Syndicate. Placed on commands it works great to activate eagle vision, the rope launcher, or weapons etc. Just make sure you have plenty of RAM. Ive used this to dictate a book section that I needed, emails and other applications. Remember that the more you use it the better it gets. It does take a while to get used to the commands, but it recognized most words and is easy to correct using the mouse if needed. CONS: The microphone that comes with the product. You will get error messages that the sound is too low no matter what you do. I recommend the purchase of a USB microphone adapter. It will solve that issue and is cheaper than buying a usb headset. Will also allow you to listen to movies, games etc through the headphones which is great if you are a night owl like me and dont want to keep everyone else awake watching a movie at 3am. Would recommend for anyone who needs to do a lot of dictation such as converting hand written journals and letters to type etc.

I’ve been using the various editions of Dragon ever since it came out. It is one of the most useful things for computer use. If one needs to do any significant amount of writing it is essential. I find that it is 90% accurate right out of the box, and approaching 100% after a little bit of use. I am of course writing this with Dragon and I will note any errors that it makes. I can see how some people might have some difficulty with it, particularly those who aren’t that computer savvy. One may have to adjust their sound settings for example. And of course having a competent computer is required. I just purchased this version for a new laptop. It is one half the price as the Nuance website. And the basic version does come with a Nuance headset. Which brings me to virtually my only complaint. The headset has excellent audio quality. But for the life of me I have yet to find any reasonably priced headset that doesn’t squeeze my head too tightly. I am trying to bend this one out so that it is a little more comfortable. Actually I am writing this using Amazon’s earbuds with microphone. Much more comfortable. I’ve also tried a Bluetooth headset designed more for listening than dictating, and the audio quality was not sufficient. I am going to look into a reasonably priced dictating Bluetooth headset which would be extremely convenient. You may have noticed that Dragon has not made a mistake yet even though I got it yesterday, and have only used it a couple of times.