I will be purchasing either viavoice or Dragon. There will be some medical terminology involved, but hopefully not enough that the medical version will be required. Does anyone have a clear favorite between the two? Can each be taught words? And what version is the cheapest that I can be happy with? It will be used for school papers, email, and the like, but not for spreadsheets or databases.
eye usse dragin ol dee teim
I use Dragon Naturally Speaking 5. It’s not too bad; I’d say that though I’ve only been “training” it for a few weeks, it’s correct on better than 70% of the words. The thing that annoys me, however, is based on your speech patterns, it’s supposed to “predict” what you’re going to say. This works great for iffy words that sounds similar, but the damn thing predicts your articles and pronouns too! Do “a” and “the” sound anything alike to you?! I don’t know if versions 6 and 7 improve over this, but I’m just using the program to avoid typing things I wrote by hand, so it’s not that big a deal that I have to edit it- no time constraints.
Both my boss and cow-orker use Dragon and are happy with it. We use a lot of jargon and acronyms. My cow-orker has a pronounced Puerto Rican accent and it works fine.
But when you do the exercises to have it recognize your speech patterns DO THEM AFTER HOURS! I had to spend two hours listening to my cow-orker repeating, “Zee ren in spen falls manly on the plen.”
Whistlepig