I’m watching a commercial for Dragon, but looked at CNet reviews and they’re mixed.
Does anyone have experience with this or other speech recognition software?
I have nothing constructive to say, but I have to ask - did you use Speech Recognition to dictate your title?
Hehe. No, I dictated to my dog, and she posted. 
My husband just got Dragon to help him write his grad school papers. I was really skeptical, but by golly it works! I was really surprised.
I thought there would be a lot more training time required but it just had him read a few passages, then it analyzed his papers he’d already written that were stored on the computer, then it was good to go!
It does make some (often humorous) mistakes, but it’s easy to correct from within the program as you go. You have to become familiar with some commands to tell it but there’s a sidebar that lists them all. You don’t have to go word. by. word. as it does better if you speak naturally; it figures out ambiguous words by context. Also, you can adjust it for various accents (southern for sure, plus some others I forget). And, I read in a review that you need to order a separate, better headset for good results, so I did, but the one that came with it worked fine.
My husband says to tell you that if you’re already a good typist, you won’t need it, but if you suck, (like us) it’s miraculous.
I was reading reviews of Dragon on Amazon and found out that Windows 7 has built in speech recognition. I just ran through the tutorial and I’m dictating this, not typing it. It’s very cool!
I have Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11And I’m using to dictate this response as well. I’ve never tried Windows sevens speech recognition system because I owned Dragon before I got Windows 7. As I look at this I would probably edit the word Sevens.
Anyway it works perfectly fine I can speak conversationally and recognizes it. I mostly use it to transcribe interviews, repeating the text that I hear so it only has to hear one voice. 11 has the ability to load in existing wave file, and it actually works pretty well if you’re talking about clean audio only one speaker. But nowhere near as well as a well-trained single-user with a headset. Have no idea why people complain so much except I can only think that they have their problems with their microphones, and have no idea how to fix them, or never bothered to go to the training. I have a well-trained copy because I’ve done a whole lot of text transcription, and have gone through several different book passages that they had available for me to use.
All have to try the Windows but again I don’t really need to go through the whole thing again.
The number one suggestion I have for anyone trying this is to make sure the microphone is picking up your voice well. During the training process it has the opportunity to record and playback your speech. If it sounds noisy it can’t recognize it well. What you have to do to fix that is go into the audio mixer application go to the recording section and adjust the microphone settings. In most cases, with most sound cards, you can boost to the microphone gain. That usually does the trick.
Use coupon code FAMILY for 50% off when you buy from their official site. Expires tomorrow. I believe they also offer a 30-day money back policy.
I started using Dragon 11 when my back and carpal tunnel got worse. I am a grad student and do quite a lot of writing, and have had great results. I think I paid $80 or so for the software, and it even came with a headset.
Thanks, y’all. Since I already own Windows 7, I’ll probably stick with that. I got the basics down in less than an hour-- just the basics. Can’t claim proficiency yet, but I was astounded at how easy the commands were to pick up. I dictated a long entry in my journal where I don’t care about simple errors. No more typing and crying while journaling. Hehe.