Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 - Review of the Speech to Text Software

Ever wanted to talk to your computer and have it understand you? Well that isn't actually possible but with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 you can talk to your computer and it will convert what you say to text. Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 is the best speech to text recognition software on the market; well at least that is what their website says. I had to test the program out to be sure it is as good as they claim.

Installation was simple enough, straight forward and fast. After installation the program which claims there is no voice training or script reading required to use Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, first tells you that without voice training it might not function properly. So they need to change their website to say that it's not required but it is suggested. After about 15 minutes of voice training I was then prompted with a request for the program to scan all of my Microsoft Word documents. This is used to help the program learn how you speak and dictate, but since a lot of my documents are full of slang and often full of mistakes I decided to skip this process.

Finally after 30 minutes I was able to speak my first sentence to the computer and I was shocked how well Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 responded. It was fast and very efficient, getting every word right and not missing anything. I have to admit I was speaking very mechanically, when I spoke naturally to the program it had a little more difficulty getting the words right.