Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6.0 Essentials

List Price: $79.95 Discount Price: $25.00

Customer Reviews:

Amazing and easy = Amazingly easy! :-) [Posted on 2003-03-06]
5 days ago I opened the package at 5:00 p.m. By 6:00 p.m. the program & mike/headphone had been installed, I had begun to train the computer by reading several short paragraphs and, hands-free, I created a document in WordPerfect. This was before I opened the manual. Since then, using the program, I have opened and closed programs, saved files, chatted on Yahoo, read and sent email, surfed the net, modified web pages and created handouts.

Initially it takes time - since it is best to correct as you go - but the more I use it, fewer corrections need to be made.
Every time that I use the program it gets smarter about how I speak. The Quick Reference card is clear, fairly comprehensive and easy to understand.

I was recently diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome and was told that my use of the computer would have to be extremely limited for some time to come. After researching the various voice-recognitions programs available I chose this one because it appeared to be no-frill and was reasonably priced. I figured that it would be a good place to start and that I could upgrade or go to another program if this did not work out for me. I am looking no further. Though I haven't finished the manual yet, using the computer is almost completely hands-free. Now I can use the computer more than I did before! What more could a gal ask? Next week I am thinking of asking it if it can do my windows.

I highly recommend this program.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 6 is better than 7! [Posted on 2003-03-15]
I was a satisfied user of version 6 (preferred) and thought I would be even happier with version 7. Bix mistake! As far as I am concerned, version 6 (preferred) is excellent.

I made the mistake of assuming the version 7 would upgrade the existing version 6 on my computer. It didn't. It installed version 7 in a different directory. Worse yet, error messages appeared. Reinstalling the program did not help. Uninstalling version 6 was no longer possible after version 7 was installed. Manually removing version 6 did not help. Fortunately I had a backup of my harddrive. I was able to return to the way things were before. I then uninstalled version 6 and it did a clean install a version 7. That solved the error messages. However, other problems with the new software remain.

I would have thought that some attention would be paid to grammatical structure when it would automatically insert a period or a comma. It does not insert comma's or periods in a very consistent way. This makes this new feature essentially useless.

Aside from this, unlike version 6, version 7 has caused some instability in my XP home edition system, leading to repeated crashes while executing "select that" and "correct that" commands. Fortunately, with Windows XP, the computer reboots after a crash. But you lose information in the process. My computer crashed three times while trying to write this section with Dragon version 7. I am now typing instead of dictating.

When doing a "correct that" command, new bugs became evident. It sometimes inserts the correction for the highlighted phrase into the middle of a previous word in a sentence. When I paused, it sometimes did not leave a space between the previous word and the next phrase. So some words remained connected likethis. Very irritating!

It would have been nice if there had been clear directions how to transfer custom words from the dictionary of version 6 to version 7. Now I have lost all the work I put into version 6. I subsequently put in hours of work inserting special terms into version 7's dictionary. However, with all the new problems associated with version 7, unless I find a solution I think I will go back to version 6, necessitating new work again.

Moral of the story as far as I am concerned: stay with version 6 (which worked fine for me) unless you are capable of dealing with a lot of frustration and able to resolve quirky issues like the ones I have run into.

Promise Not Yet Fulfilled [Posted on 2003-03-26]
I purchased this product for my 9-year-old daughter to make it easier for her to get started on her creative writing. She went through the required voice recognition training program. Once she began to dictate, the computer wrote gibberish. I had her train the program some more; it still wrote gibberish. In case the problem was her child's voice or problems with her reading skills during the training process, I signed on as a new reader and tried to train the program to recognize my voice. It did better than it did with my daughter, but it still made a lot of errors. I suppose this product might work if you're willing to invest a significant amount of time on voice recognition training, but it requires more than we have the time and patience for. This is NOT an "open the box and get started right away" type of product.

By the way, it's advertised as being compatible with Windows ME, but it didn't work on my daughter's computer (even though it had the minimum system requirements). I had to load it onto my newer Windows XP machine.

Perhaps this program works for those who are willing to put in the time it takes to develop accuracy in voice recognition, but for now I consider the technology to be a promise that has yet to be fulfilled.

Works Surprisingly Well [Posted on 2003-05-27]
When I decided to try a voice recognition program, I first bought IBM ViaVoice 10. It would not launch on my PC - turns out that if you have any sort of firewall (or related utility) installed on your computer, it will interfere with ViaVoice 10, which uses the TCP/IP protocol. (Earlier versions of ViaVoice apparently don't have this problem.) After returning ViaVoice, I tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking v. 6 (Essentials), which I'd heard was actually superior to version 7. My expectations were low, but I was pleasantly surprised. After five minutes of training, I achieved reasonably good results. After an hour of training, results were excellent - especially when the program was used in conjunction with MS Word 2002, as opposed to DragonPad. Does Dragon make mistakes? Sure. But they are easily corrected, and in most cases not much worse than the typos you might make if you're a poor typist (like me). Besides, dictating to your PC is fun - and a welcome change from typing. The program also comes with a full-featured, printed instruction manual written in plain English by somebody with a sense of humor! This is a real rarity in these days of "online help" documents apparently translated from Japanese. I recommend this program to anyone who has the patience to train it, and a willingness to put up with some errors.

A DREAM COME TRUE FOR PARALYZED LIKE ME [Posted on 2003-07-21]
I HAVE USED DRAGON SINCE ABOUT 1989. THEY WERE MAKING IT FIRST FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME WHO CAN'T USE THEIR HANDS, I'M PARALYZED. IT TYPES 180 WORDS PER MIN. THEY ARE THE FIRST SO THEY ARE THE BEST BUT GET THE DRAGON DICTATE PREFERRED EDITION IT IS FASTER AND MORE FLEXIBLE. IF U DONT LOVE IT - DONT BUY WHAT I SAY ANYMORE ...IF U DO SEND ME A THANK YOU BY GIVING A DONATION TO CCI.. MY DOG HELPER ORG. CANINE COMPANIONS FOR INDEPENDENCE.
JIM KISTNER
JKISTNER@NYC.RR.COM

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