Dragon Naturally Speaking

Clients frequently ask me about Dragon Naturally Speaking and whether it will work for them.  I was reminded of this by a link posted on Technolawyer to a You Tube video demonstrating Dragon.  The video demonstrates both the strengths of Dragon: it is indeed very powerful if it is configured properly (there is a lot of time required for setup. However, it is far from perfect, even in the hands of an experienced person.

In my experience, people either love it or hate it. There is very little middle ground. If you do want to go down this route, there are a number of things to consider. Mainly, in order to make it really productive, you need to put additional money into some add-ons. The two main ones are to get the legal edition, which contains provisions for correctly registering things that would otherwise be incomprehensible - for example citations. The second, if you are accustomed to dictating, is to get a digital dictation machine that is compatible with Dragon, such as those offered by Phillips or Olympus. The ideal solution is that you then plug the memory card into a slot in your PC and Dragon will transcribe it. Obviously this is not perfect, but it is likely to be a lot faster to correct the errors (you can listen to the original while you are doing it) than to transcribe from scratch.

But such a solution is likely to set you back over $1,000, so I would recommend trying the basic version of Dragon first.  Then if you decide “this could be really useful, but I need to make it more productive,” you can spring for the extras. If on the other hand you decide “this is way more trouble than it’s worth,” you are only out $100 or so for the experiment.