If Nuance could weed these out, voice control might have a chance of becoming a mainstream user interface. We have to admire Dragon’s ability to transcribe speech via a low-grade laptop mic without any training whatsoever, but it’s undermined by too many basic grammatical mistakes. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium review: verdict It sounds long-winded, but it’s actually a fast way to navigate by voice alone. Keep choosing until the grid is placed over the link or item you want to select, then simply say “click”. It throws a grid of nine squares over the screen: when you say the corresponding number (“one” for top left, “two” for top middle and so on), another grid appears in that square with another nine segments. The Mouse Grid is another clever navigation tool. The failure to add a second “o” on “to” at the end of the final sentence was another common error, as was missing possessive apostrophes and the constant transposing of “its” and “it’s” – all basic errors that were picked up by Word’s grammar checker but seemingly considered acceptable by Dragon. You might forgive Dragon for mistaking “faults” for “thoughts” in the first sentence, but having worked out that we meant “faults” in the second sentence, it should have inferred that we meant “faulty software” rather than the nonsensical “40 software”.
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For example, the software just transcribe the word forts when I meant faults, as in 40 software. Take this uncorrected test passage, for example: “Correcting thoughts takes far too long. We saw accuracy improve noticeably over the first couple of days as the software adapted to our verbal tics, acquired words from our emails and learnt from the repeated correction of errors.Įven after a few days of heavy use, though, we were still seeing an average of one or two errors per paragraph – largely grammatical or contextual errors, not transcription errors that might improve over time. Dragon no longer requires users to read out four minutes of text to train the software, so you can get going right away and let Dragon learn as you work. Even with the laptop placed to the side as we sat in front of a monitor at our desk, it picked up every word uttered in our home-office environment.Īccuracy was impressive – if not perfect – from the get-go. In our tests, the accuracy of NaturallySpeaking’s transcription didn’t seem to suffer as a result of us using the internal microphone on our Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium review: loud and clear
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It’s also great for Windows tablet users who don’t want to rely on the screen-swamping software keyboard. It’s a great step forward: business travellers can flip open their laptops and immediately start dictating emails or memos without having to fiddle with extra equipment. Now Nuance hopes to turn things around with a new approach: rather than requiring a dedicated headset or dictation device, the latest release of Dragon NaturallySpeaking works with your laptop’s built-in microphone. Voice recognition is gaining momentum on mobile devices, but the technology has grown rather stale on the PC.