I received a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking at no charge to facilitate my review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

Windows 7 has built-in voice recognition technology. It’s awful. The first time I tried it, it made so many mistakes I sent the results to my sister in an email as a joke so she could get a good laugh out of it. It was absolutely hysterical — but not very useful.

Then I got the opportunity to try out Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the industry leader in voice recognition technology. There is simply no comparison.

When you first install Dragon NaturallySpeaking, you have to be prepared to spend a little bit of time training the software to recognize your voice. This isn’t a lengthy process — it only takes a few minutes — but you need to be prepared to set aside that time.  After this, the software will continue to learn as you use it.

Straight out of the box, though, I was pretty impressed with how effectively it recognized my speech. The software rarely makes mistakes, and when it does, what I intended to say is usually the first alternative offered, or possibly the second. Only on rare occasions have I had to manually enter a correction (and this is pretty easy to do).

Uses for Speech Recognition Software

Especially if you combine speech recognition software with a wireless headset, a plethora of possibilities open up. This blog post was written using the software. (Although I don’t yet have a wireless headset; I’m still wired.)  I have a huge backlog of recipes torn from magazines that needed entering into my recipe database software. Using Dragon NaturallySpeaking has made it much easier for me to transcribe those recipes. Blog posts, e-books, emails, and other documents can easily be drafted via speech recognition.

If you want to transcribe a final draft with the software, you’ll need to learn a few tricks. It takes some practice to get accustomed to speaking terms like comma, period, and other forms of punctuation out loud.  You also have to be prepared to perfect any errors the software mistakenly makes. However, if you’re using the software to create a first draft, it’s quick and easy to get your thoughts down on “paper,” so you can go back later and manually edit the draft with the more familiar keyboard commands. (As you get more familiar with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, you can do more of your editing directly through the speech recognition software.)

Personally, I found that smaller, less significant, documents like recipe data entry and emails, were a good way to practice using the software, train it to recognize my voice, and become more familiar with the voice commands.

Apart from blogging or authoring e-books, and use within the home (as, for example, recipe entry), Dragon NaturallySpeaking has numerous potential uses within the homeschool. Many of us have children who are reluctant writers. Traditionally, the primary solution to this has been to allow our children to type their papers until such time as they become more comfortable with writing them out by hand. However, voice recognition is another option to enable your children to get their words down.  In fact, this is a method that can even be used with very young children who can’t write yet. Rather than you needing to be there to take dictation as they narrate to you, they can dictate their papers directly to the computer, on their own.

The Only Downside

Apart from the initial expense, the only downside I’ve found to Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the memory usage. While running, it uses a good deal of computer memory. While starting up, it’s a bit slow, and makes my computer rather sluggish. This means it’s more efficient for me to do everything I need the software for all at one time, rather than having to start and stop it several times.

Even with this bit of lag, and the minor need for adjustments, I found this to be a valuable tool and well worth the investment.

(Note: In this whole post, Dragon made about four minor errors.  Considering my own brain-to-hand “processing” would probably make several, I think that’s a pretty good track record!)