Find out how Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 ups the ante in speech recognition.
In a world where one company virtually controls the entire speech to text software market, it might seem mighty tempting for Nuance management to quietly sip margaritas, and watch their record profits and revenue all the way to the bank (over US$900 million in the last year).
Dragon: New vs. Old
Eager to avoid self-repetition, Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 places a greater emphasis on web search technology.
You can now say web and browser links by voice without the trouble of typing messy URLs. Though trying that with a 100 character long URL might prove tiresome by saying the letters out loud.
You can also send email, IMs and combine multiple commands to perform time saving tasks.
Users of the old Dragon versions will be pleased to learn that the overall performance of the software being greatly improved to keep up with the changing grammatical structures in the user's voice.
Quick voice formatting has also been added to ensure the process of actions like bolding, italicising and underlining are now a quick and painless process (something that irked us in earlier editions).
BRB - LOL! ROLF! Put a shrimp on the BARBIE MATE!
The popularity of mobile txting and social networking has given birth to a new language. In the new version of Dragon, there’s even a speech dialect you can select that is based on the hipster Facebook crowd.
Dragon 10 has a better database of English dialects (amongst the many other languages on offer), to keep pace with grammatical changes in the spoken vernacular. And yes – there’s an Aussie accent.
Think big, think mobility
Usually when we think about speech to text, we often think document dictation, but for Dragon, the scope of voice recognised software goes way beyond the desktop space and is gainer greater traction in the mobile space, particularly products such as smartphones, where the obvious voice prompted actions are a big advantage to users.
Have you tried it yet? You might be surprised
You’ve probably already used Dragon software and just don’t know it yet. Many of the top Australian companies employ Dragon’s voice technologies through their customer service divisions - Telstra's directory assistance service is one example.
Nuance boasts up to 99% accuracy for Dragon 10 on the Australian Dragon website (link), but Mahoney admitted it was closer in real world usage to 90%, which is still pretty high in our view.
The Holy Grail
Still, the latest Version of Dragon is not without its faults. As Mahoney admits, one of the holy grails of speech technologies is the ability to record multiple streams, or in other words – figure out who’s talking in a group of people without thinking it’s all being spoke by one person.
Pricing and availability
Available in 3 different versions: Professional, Preferred and Standard. Dragon 10 Standard edition is our pick for best cost vs. performance. (Interestingly, in the year 2001, the software cost as much as $3000).
For $149 (standard edition), which is roughly the same price as your typical anti-virus suite (Norton, McAfee, etc), speech recognition software is finally at a price point that makes it far more attractive for the average end-user to try.
Have you used speech recognition? Would you reccommend it to your friends or family? Let us know below.