TOPIC: Dragon Naturally Speaking

[glow=red,2,300]Dragon Naturally Speaking 11.5 is on sale![/glow]

Dragon Naturally Speaking is a voice to text software that I have been using extensively for many years.
I use it for almost everything - e-mail, blogging, writing HIP templates and comments and just about anything else
that requires text entry.  It works in almost everything that will accept text input.

If you have been wanting to try this out would balk at the $99 list price, now's your chance to try it out without breaking the bank.
It is currently on sale at Tiger Direct for only $34.99, including a headset microphone, after rebate.  Here is the direct link:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=2112977&sku=S30-1049&SRCCODE=WEM3140BY&cm_mmc=email-_-Main-_-WEM3140-_-tigeremail3140&utm_source=EML&utm_medium=main&utm_campaign=WEM3140

now that kind of stinks !

I highly recommend it!

What stinks David?  The fact that you purchased it at full price and now it's one third the price?  

I suspect that they will soon come out with a new version and are clearing stock of the older version.
I upgraded to 11.5 from 10.5 to handle some issues that 10.5 was having working into HIP.
The 11.5 version appears to work with HIP fine so that seem to work.

That sounds like a cool tool. Maybe some of these texting idiots who drive while texting should get one? Now I'm wishing I would have went with the HIP reporting software. I am complaining all the time because once I get home from an inspection, it takes me 2 1/2 or more hours to finish my report. I can only use a tablet that runs Windows 7 with my software, so I still fill in the manual checklist then type it all on my PC when I get home. You can just speak this into your HIP software, and it will turn into text automatically? I suppose even after you complete your report, you can "tweak" it once you get home and look it over before sending it to the client. It does sound pretty awesome!

Hi Michael,
Actually, on my cell phone, I can talk to text.
I'm actually using Dragon to dictate this response right now.  This latest version, 11.5, works very well.
Any speech recognition or voice to text type program is very processor intensive.  This means if you are on a
low-end computer/laptop it's going to be pretty laggy. It will still work but waiting for the text to catch up with your speech can be a bit disconcerting at first but you can get over that.  On my desktop here, it types into the text field as fast as I can talk.

After years of using this and other voice to text programs, I have become very good at voicing my thoughts in a cogent fashion
so that they are fully readable and understandable by anyone reading them.  Any of these type of programs do take a bit of "training" of both the software itself and of the user.  The software needs to learn your speech patterns, intonations and diction and the user needs to learn how to craft their speaking into proper sentences.  During a normal conversation, most people are a bit sloppy with their language.  We as listeners often learn to adapt to this type of communication but it does not translate well in printed form, hence the need to actually learn how to talk properly if it's going to be in dictation form. ;D

Although I am a pretty good typist, I actually use all of my fingers  :, I still use Dragon for almost any text input since it is just so much faster.  It literally types as fast as I can talk.  You can actually set it up to capitalize the first words of sentences (automatic after period) and do things such as add a comma at a natural pause.  It even auto-hyphenates words where appropriate.  See, it just did in the previous sentence.  This technology has come a long way since I first started using it back in the early 2000.  It still worked then but the computers were not up to the task and they had a hard time keeping up. Running this type of software on a 386 was like watching paint dry.

This $39.95 price is outstanding for what is normally a $100 program.  It's a great opportunity for someone to jump in for not all that much money.  That's why I posted it here.  I have no connection to Nuance, in fact I'm not totally happy with some of their other software but that's another story.  This offering works sweet.

That's good stuff, Dana. Maybe the newest version will "learn" to take out my curse words  :-X. Seriously, I'm gonna look into it. There's an example. It will learn that "gonna" is hillbilly for "going to". My wife has a deaf and mute cousin, who calls using the same technology in the opposite direction. It must work decent, because the cousin's typing, grammar, spelling, and even placement of words in a sentence is nearly illegible, and the system transfers it to voice quite well. Thanks for sharing the info. A karma for you!