Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6 Preferred

by Scansoft

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• ASIN: B000064130
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 10, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #12,953 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred speech recognition software enables small office, home office, business, and educational users to create documents, spreadsheets, and e-mail by voice command. Integrated with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, and Corel WordPerfect, Dragon NaturallySpeaking works with virtually all Windows-based applications.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking lets you listen to incoming e-mail and documents being read aloud, search the Web, access information, chat with instant messenger programs, or navigate Web pages by speaking URLs and links. Create dictation shortcuts that enable you to insert blocks of texts or bitmaps--such as your name, title, and signature--by voice. You can even dictate directly into a PC or a ScanSoft-approved handheld digital recorder.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

125 of 126 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Patience Rewarded, May 4, 2002

By 

Jack Kessler (El Cerrito, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6 Preferred (CD-ROM)

This is a breakthrough product. I had Dragon version 3 on a Pentium 2, and it was so frustrating that I gave up. I think that was most people's response to earlier versions of voice recognition software. Part of the problem was processor speed and memory. Now, with a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 and 256 MB it is at last a reasonable and workable software.

However the training described in the advertising is optimistic unto misleading. The user files continue to accumulate corrections and understandings of the user's speech. It is after several hours of dictating and making corrections that it becomes reliable. The longer one uses it the fewer edits one needs to make.

By pronouncing clearly and rapidly the user can get very high accuracy. It is counter-intuitive that it should be more accurate for more rapid, more continuous speech, but that is how it works.

The integration of the Preferred version with Word, Excel, Access, and Internet Explorer makes it useful and convenient, and keeps it from being a novelty. For instance, I am dictating this in IExplorer and it has required very few edits. I expect that dictated documents will always require some edits but it will save tremendous amounts of typing and time.

For people who do large amounts of typing this product is invaluable - a real breakthrough. The few hours spent training the software will be rewarded amply by months spent dictating instead of typing.

I strongly recommend using a USB microphone. With an analog microphone the user-trained files are dependent on the sound card. With USB they can be copied to other computers, such as laptops. (And you thought cellphone users were annoying - just wait until people are dictating to laptops on airplanes.)

If one uses Microsoft Outlook for correspondence, be sure to select Word as your editor because Dragon does not work with the default editor. (Tools-->Options-->Mail Format-->Use Word as Editor).

Downsides:
This is billed as protecting one's hands from wearing out from overuse. But bear in mind - voices wear out too.

If one sets Dragon to maximum accuracy it becomes somewhat frustratingly slow. This is not caused by insufficient memory as I thought (I added 512 MB - didn't help). It is a processor speed limitation. Which I take to mean that the glory days of voice recognition lie ahead of us. When Intel's and AMD's marketing wars will have brought us 10 , 20, or 100 GHz processors, we will be able to turn to our "Scotty" computer and say, as we always dreamed of saying, "Beam me up, Scotty" - and it will do it.

60 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Unsatisfying--not recommended, August 6, 2002

By 

Stephen M. Bainbridge "www.professorbainbridg... (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6 Preferred (CD-ROM)

It sure would be nice if Dragon worked out of the box, let alone if Dragon delivered the functonalities promised. In my experience, it did neither. (I am running Dragon 6 Preferred on an XP Pro machine using Word 2002 and Outlook 2002.)

Within an hour of use, I began having a problem in which Dragon declined to capitalize the first word of a sentence and failed to put a space between words. Resort to ScanSoft's technical support site was dismaying. Contacting a technician by e-mail costs $10. Contacting one by phone is $20. I don't know about you, but I feel that after spending $160+ on a program, and running into a major bug after only an hour of use, I ought to get some free tech support.

Okay, so then I went to the technical notes section. Tried multiple searches. Nothing. Finally started scrolling through the list of recent tech notes. (A depressingly long list, I might add.) I found a recent tech note addressing the words run together problem, which included many of the search terms I had used in the search engine. Why the search engine did not pick this note up, I still don't know. In any event, the note required me to download Service Pack 1. Then it turned out that Service Pack 1 was only for Dragon Pro, not Dragon preferred. Hence, ScanSoft has NO fix for my problem.

Additional problems developed thereafter: The "Select and Say" and Correct functions stopped working in Word 2002. Dragon turns out to basically not be usable in Outlook 2002 unless you use Word as your editor, which then means you lose the correction function. This makes it almost impossible to correct mistakes, let alone train Dragon to improve its accuracy.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Please do not ignore reading this!!!, November 27, 2002

By 

Small Press Fan (parts unknown) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6 Preferred (CD-ROM)

If you are planning on buying any of ScanSoft's Dragon NaturallySpeaking software, I would urge you to first visit their website...to read up on their pricing scheme for tech support.

I quote, "You may contact ScanSoft Technical Support by email through the support section of this web site. Fill out a Problem Report Form and a response will be sent in a timely manner upon receipt. Each incident entered from the Problem Report Form with be charged $[money]. Email is a lower cost option to telephone support."

[money]to get them to answer your tech support questions on their products?!?

But that's not the worst of it. Notice the last sentence of that quote. "Email is a lower cost option to telephone support."

Is it ever.

I quote further, "One free technical incident" support call per customer is allowed, each "Additional incidents $[money] each"; ...for each additional call!

Consider yourself lucky, version 5 users don't even get the first free call.

So what does this mean? It means that if you don't get all of your problems solved in one phone call, or, heaven forbid, you have a problem somewhere down the line, you get the privilege of paying ScanSoft ...for any tech support you might need getting their product to run (and that's per call).

I wish you luck if you go ahead and buy this product; but please, don't just take my word for what I'm writing...do yourself a favor and check out their website for yourself first.