Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Reviews

Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software has won more than 175 awards worldwide. The software program allows you to create documents and e-mails, fill out forms, all by speaking.

Awards

Critics everywhere are singing its praises and it's currently on the best-seller list at every major software retailer in the country. Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software has won more than 175 awards worldwide. 2006 Awards:

C|NET
Editors' Choice
February 2006

PC World
100 best products of 2006

Specialties

The Software is offered in specialty editions to accommodate  industry specific vocabulary and formatting.  All editions detailed below support input from digital voice recorders and desktop dictation devices (Philips SpeechMike and Olympus Directrec) 

1. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred is designed more for the consumer market. It is essentially a scaled down (less features) version of the Professional Edition. The Preferred Version offers the same great accuracy as Professional since it is the same same speech recognition engine.
2. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional is really designed for professional users. It  allows you to create custom vocabularies to accommodate industry specific terminology and works with most any program.
3. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical is designed specifically for the healthcare industry. Providing over a dozen specialty specific vocabularies including Cardiology, Emergency, Gastroenterology, General Practice, Medical, Mental Health, Neurology, Ob-Gyn, Oncology, Orthopedic, Pathology, Pediatrics, Radiology  and Surgery. 
4. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal is designed specifically for the legal industry.  The software provides professional terminology and appropriate formatting
   for example it automatically formats legal citations.  The software features ability to create special voice commands that instantly build and format templates for contracts or other legal documents.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Software Reviews

How well Does Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 work? Check out the latest reviews

Overall Conclusions

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is an excellent program.  Internally we have utilized the software for years to produce emails, create web content, write articles and post forum topics. We even use the software to communicate with our customers via live chat. It just makes creating content easy. Normally we would provide a staff review, however we opted to provide a collection of reviews from a myriad of sources. The reviews provided above offer an interesting perspective, several of the authors had little to no experience with speech recognition software prior to taking Dragon 9 for a test drive.  With so many write ups from PC Magazine to the New York times, there is definitely a great deal of press coverage for the release of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9. Most everyone agrees the software is phenomenal, it just works.  There are countless reasons to switch or start using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 and while we are huge fans, we do have a few gripes which we have compiled in the "Cons" list below.  Lastly we completed a Staff Rating. 

Conclusions - Cons

	Hardware Requirements: Minimal Hardware requirements listed by Nuance are just that minimal and will render minimal performance. We tested the Professional Edition on a system with 512MB,  and experienced performance lags and even fluctuations in accuracy.  For optimal results double the suggested requirements.
	Stability: While the software is designed to work with several popular programs, it can be a bit buggy.
	Preferred Edition lacks a few important features: The Preferred Edition does not not support use with several popular email programs, if you want to use speech to dictate and navigate in Microsoft Outlook for example you have to upgrade to the Professional Edition.
	Professional Edition a bit pricey:  While the software is definitely worth the investment, we still think Professional 9 is bit expensive.

Rating for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Professional, Medical & Legal