Lance Whitney is a Journalist, IT Consultant and Web Developer with almost 20 years experience in the IT world. Here are some extracts from an evaluation Lance recently conducted of Dragon NaturallySpeaking against the built-in speech recognition solutions provided by Windows Vista and Windows 7, published on www.TMCnet.com on 28th of April 2010.
The purpose of voice recognition software is to move around your computer, run commands, and dictate documents solely by speaking. You can use it to navigate windows, open and close applications, and run key menu and toolbar commands. You can also use it in your browser to surf the Web. But it’s most commonly used to dictate text as an alternative to the keyboard and mouse.
Both Windows Vista and Windows 7 offer their own built-in speech recognition. Similar to NaturallySpeaking, Windows Speech Recognition lets you run different commands and dictate text by voice. But NaturallySpeaking does offer several advantages over the Windows speech utility, especially for business users.
To gauge the actual accuracy of NaturallySpeaking I took both it and Windows Speech Recognition through several test runs. After setting up both programs to understand my voice, I dictated the same passages and uttered the same commands to move around my computer. Though both programs performed well with simple text and phrases, NaturallySpeaking was much more adept and accurate at comprehending more difficult and complex works and phrases.
I also found it easier to correct errors in NaturallySpeaking as the software offers you more options to fix a typo or other glitch. You can choose from a list of suggested words or spell out the correct word, and you can also correct mistakes during dictation or separately.
Beyond its accuracy and ease of use, the professional edition of NaturallySpeaking adds a host of features that should be helpful to an enterprise. You can use NaturallySpeaking Pro to dictate directly into common Windows and Microsoft applications, including Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Internet Explorer. The software also lets you create voice macros to store large chunks of text. Instead of typing your company’s address, contact information, or other frequently-used passages, you save them as voice macros and speak a short simple voice command to insert them into a document.
Additionally, you can create more advanced voice shortcuts that perform different actions in an email program such as Outlook. For example, you could create a voice shortcut that says “Send an email to Lance Whitney.” The shortcut will open Outlook, set up a new email, and put my name in the “to” field. Those shortcuts also apply to your Web searches.
Finally, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Pro provides several network features that make it ideal for a business rolling it out to multiple users. IT admins can deploy the software via the network to install it for multiple people. You can also store and manage each individual’s voice profile on a network share or server so that roaming users can tap into their profiles from any PC.
