When most people find out about Dragon Software they don’t think of the potential and the amazing benefits of such a software.

Looking back at what we believed would be our future technology would be like, voice to text software was one of the things that featured in many forms of science fiction entertainment.  Talking and issuing commands to a computer, even now, seems like the stuff of fantasy, but it’s actually more than possible.

It’s easy and extremely accessible too.

While most of us (Bill Gates excepted) don’t live in a house where we can cook our food and tivo Jersey Shore with simple voice commands, but we probably will one day.  For now though we can be content with doing this on a miniature level, controlling our computers with our voices.

And of course that’s not the only function of Dragon software.  The transcription of your spoken word to text on your screen works brilliantly well and has so many advantages.

Dragon Naturally Speaking is available in

Home Edition and

Premium Edition

Dragon Software Advantages

Speaking instead of typing.  I can’t express how handy this is.  If you’re a fumble fingered typist like me this saves so much time it’s unreal.  It also reduces frustration levels quite considerably.  There’s nothing worse than typing away merrily and realize that you’ve made a number of typos.  A good text editor will have auto corrected some of them, but it takes as long to correct my awful typing as it does to actually type the text out in the first place.  And it doesn’t help that I’m a perfectionist so I can’t help but check my spelling all the time.  With DNS I can check it’s correct as my verbal commands are being taken down.  I love it.

Faster text input.  What’s your typing speed?  Maybe it’s pretty good, but watching the average person type is painful.  And typing can be a pretty boring thing to learn.  But now you don’t have to.  Dragon Software takes away all the pain from typing and makes your text input much faster.  I would say it’s faster than a pretty good typist.  Sure, you still have those people who can type faster than a speeding bullet, but this isn’t made for them.

Hands free.  You don’t have to use your mouse as much anymore.  I don’t know about you, but when you use a computer a lot the chances of a repetitive strain injury are worrying.  I much prefer dictating and issuing commands when it’s not absolutely necessary for me to be using a mouse or the keyboard.

So, who will be using this technology?

Is Dragon Software Right For You?

There are many groups of people who would benefit from using this:

Ask yourself these questions…

• Do I want to increase my typing speed?
• Do I find typing boring?
• Do I find typing difficult?
• Could I get more work done if I could get my thoughts down faster?

If the answer to even one of those questions is ‘Yes’ then you NEED Dragon Software.

The whole point of Dragon voice recognition is that you speak into a microphone and the software interprets your speech and puts it into words on your computer.  It’s an absolutely brilliant system that speeds up so many tasks.

As well as dictation you can also control your computer’s functions with your voice.

I’m sure you can imagine the incredible scope and utility this sort of software can provide.  This is the sort of thing that science fiction is made of.  How many sci-fi movies, books and TV shows have a computer that understands human speech?  Most of them.  And with Dragon voice recognition, we’re one step closer to that.

The sorts of people who could benefit hugely from this type of speech recognition software are:

• Slow typists.

No more will you have to two finger type, taking longer than you need to, being frustrated with spelling mistakes and typos.  Typing is a skill that isn’t essential.  But it’s like writing.  The more you do it, the better you become.  But at the end of the day, there are those people who will never be good writers and there are those people who will never type dozens of words a minute.

There’s nothing wrong with not being a great typist and now it shouldn’t hold you back from anything.  Simply talk into the microphone and Dragon Naturally Speaking will effortlessly convert your words into text and you’ll save time and money and you won’t be as frustrated.

• Those unable to type

Some people cannot type due to being differently abled.  In this case, Dragon software is perfect.  You need only to be able to speak into a microphone to be able to utilize this amazing product.

• Multi-taskers

I like to think that I fall into this bracket.  I’m a busy man, as are many people in the 21^st century.  And we need efficiency.

Dragon Voice Recognition

Being able to simply speak and have our computers respond is superb.  It’s exactly the sort of thing that we need because we have busy lifestyles.  And to be frank, the software pays for itself within a couple of weeks.

I don’t know about you, but I value my time and anything that can save me some time is fantastic.  Dragon voice recognition software represents exactly that.  A time saver. Therefore, it’s a money saver too.  But really, time is the one thing I can’t get back.

Even in this modern day people are unsure about voice to text software, and I’ll be honest it is pretty sci-fi, but it’s fantastic, and it’s real.

With modern software improving all the time, along with the advances in personal computing hardware, voice activation and recognition capability is getting better and better.

Voice To Text Software

The benefits are amazing:

• Hands free at the computer. Think of how this could aid you in your daily life.
• The speed increase in your text input is outstanding. Up to 3 times faster is the rate generally reported. Just imagine what it could do for your data entry…
• Browsing the web just became even better. Tell your computer verbally which link to click.
• It sounds like something we’ve been watching for years on Star Trek, and it is. The future’s here. And about time!

Now, as with anything, you need to take a certain amount of care.

• Still sit in a comfortable position so you can reach the microphone without straining
• Speak at a normal pitch and volume
• Still take regular breaks
• Make sure you are drinking regularly
• Be aware also that if you catch the flu, your voice may change dramatically, so take careful note of what your dictating.

Make sure you do your research on voice to text software before getting your credit card out and good luck!

I’ve recently tried out the 2 most popular iPhone voice recognition apps. I was seriously impressed with both of them.

I’ve always been fascinated by the feature on most phones where you can just speak a contact’s name and the phone dials that person. Brilliant! The technology gets better all the time. Thinking back, this feature was a selling point to me of which cellphone I would buy and I was generally disappointed.

Nowadays, our phones are so evolved and the application creators so clever, that not only can you dictate to your iPhone, but you can use the speech recognition sofware to send SMS and update your Facebook and Twitter accounts. I am so happy with this!

Ok, you know what the best news is?

Both applications are free!

If you have an iPhone you NEED one of these:

iPhone Voice Recognition Apps

Vlingo Voice App

Vlingo, I’d never heard of them. Impressive application…

Now, there is a paid option, it’s like 7 bucks, which will hardly break the bank, but you don’t even need to pay that. For free you can:

Browse the Web
Dial contacts
Update Facebook and Twitter and
Use Google Maps

To use it for emails and texts, you’ll need to pay the measly seven dollars.

Dragon Dictation

Now, I’m not going to recommend one over the other, both are excellent, but I will say that Dragon Dictation is totally free and in practice seems to be a lot faster.

The guy on this video is not using any camera trickery, this is exactly how it works.

I am so impressed by this, Nuance have never let me down. Check out my Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 review elsewhere on this site.

So, for iPhone voice recognition you’ve got 2 great contenders, doing slightly different things, but an awesome taste of things to come.

Is it worth getting, or like other free software, will it turn out to be an exercise in frustration?

So, for the top 3 examples of

Free Speech Recognition Software

E-Speaking – Free for 30 days and then it’s only $14. So is it worth using? Considering it uses an outdated model, I would say no. It’s inexpensive, but for those of you who use a modern version of Microsoft Windows, you’d be better off using:

Windows Speech Recognition – Available on Vista and Windows 7, this truly fantastic for the price. And let me tell you that the price is FREE. Can’t get better than that. Whatever you say about Microsoft and Windows, and generally I say good things, you can’t fault them for this. Windows Speech Recognition blows the competition, even the premium competition, right out of the water. It is only surpassed by Dragon Naturally Speaking. I suppose it’s not something you can go out and buy and it’s also not immediately obvious, but if you use Vista or 7 and need free speech recognition software, this is an excellent way to start.

Tazti Speech Recognition – Well, it’s just that. Speech recognition. It won’t made notes for you, but it will navigate through your programs with just your voice. It’s free and easy to use. If you don’t need dictation, go get it.

So, in a nutshell, it depends on what you need:

Got Windows Vista or 7? Use the built in free speech recognition software.

Otherwise, e-speaking is pretty good or

If you don’t need dictation try out Tazti, it’s free so you got nothing to lose.

And if you don’t think that free speech recognition software is going to do the job, check out this Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 Review.

The best technology, be it hardware or software will always be ahead of its time. We may, as consumers, complain about having to upgrade, but if it wasn’t like this, we would make little progress.

So, without further ado, the

Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 Review

First off, what is Dragon Naturally Speaking?

If you’re new to this software, in a word, it’s incredible.

As that won’t help you much, it’s a sophisticated piece of software that interprets your voice commands to your computer and executes them.  This is exhibited mainly in 1 of 2 ways…

Dictation

or

Voice Control of your computer functions.

All you do is speak into your microphone and DNS does the rest.

Setup

In order for the software to get used to your voice (your inflection, accent etc) you read a short passage into the microphone during setup.  This is about all you need to do.

Use

Now it’s just a matter of how you use it.

Let’s say you’re composing an article such as this one.  All you need to do is simply speak into the mic what you want to happen, speaking plainly all the punctuation you need.  It doesn’t recognize the end of a sentence so you need to say ‘period’ for example.

To use it to control your computer, you do exactly the same thing.

Let’s see it in action…

As you can see, it’s best used quite casually. Speaking in a stiled manner may be different than the way you read out the setup text so make sure you’re relaxed, with your microphone in a comfortable position. A headset is definitely the best thing to have for this software.

DNS is eerily accurate in getting the speech right. It’ll take a little bit of getting used to but once you are practiced you will be able to compose documents, articles, emails etc far quicker than you used to type them. Even with the infrequent corrections you will inevitably have to make it’s still a huge time saver. And that’s if you’re a competent typist. If you’re a bit fumble fingered this is truly a godsend.

There are different versions other than the home version, giving different capabilities, but that’s for another time.

The learning curve is a little steep if you aren’t used to speech recognition software, but that goes with the territory for much new technology, but if you have even a little interest in letting your computer do all the hard typing work you currently have to do yourself, there is no better option than DNS.

I hope this Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 Review has been of use to you. I can’t rate it highly enough.