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Dragon have made a suite of products aimed at business and home users who want to be able to speak to their PC and get the PC to annotate the words.
You may ask why this is necessary when versions of XP and Vista already have functions built in to take voice commands and also dictation software for MS Word and other word processors. The answer is that Dragon is trying to provide something a bit more accurate and with many more options.
The Preferred Mobile pack comes bundled with a headphone/microphone headset and a Philips 128MB dictation device.
Installation is pretty straight forward and, like with many other forms of voice software, the final piece of installation involves a short check on microphone levels and background noise. I had to run through this several times to get the optimum setup as the first time it refused to recognise a lot of the words you need to recite. Still, it may well have been the bundled microphone that caused the issues.
Once up and running, Dragon sits in your toolbox and opens with a bar across the top of the screen where you can click to turn on or off the Microphone and choose the different modes. These modes give you varying access to your PC via voice control. The first mode lets you control the whole PC with voice, but seems to get in the way of writing text, as it occasionally brings up menus when you try and say certain phrases. The second allows a small amount of menu functionality and the third is just for annotation to Word or something similar.
Using the headset I was able to train the program to recognise most of my words after about 2 half hour sessions. It still messed up at points and if someone came into the room or a loud noise occurred it would often mess up again, but aside from this it works well.
Then I tried the Philips voice recorder. The quality of this little beauty is amazing. Ok, so it will only record 30 minutes of speech at the best quality but even on lower settings it’s still very clear. Plugging the recorder into the USB slot with the cable provided, I found that I needed to make a recording on to the Hard Drive before the Dragon software would touch it. This is a bit of a pain, but nothing major and it was soon writing out what I had recorded with varying results. After a few goes it got the text about 70% correct, not too bad but not ideal either.
While this set has some impressive ideas, the results can be variable and on a par with Vista’s own voice recognition. If you need the set for recording audio outside of your home (ie in a lecture or meeting) it could be useful, especially if you train the software to recognise your voice for longer. But with Vista’s own software available for free, I’m not sure that £160 is worth paying at the moment.
You may ask why this is necessary when versions of XP and Vista already have functions built in to take voice commands and also dictation software for MS Word and other word processors. The answer is that Dragon is trying to provide something a bit more accurate and with many more options.
The Preferred Mobile pack comes bundled with a headphone/microphone headset and a Philips 128MB dictation device.
Installation is pretty straight forward and, like with many other forms of voice software, the final piece of installation involves a short check on microphone levels and background noise. I had to run through this several times to get the optimum setup as the first time it refused to recognise a lot of the words you need to recite. Still, it may well have been the bundled microphone that caused the issues.
Once up and running, Dragon sits in your toolbox and opens with a bar across the top of the screen where you can click to turn on or off the Microphone and choose the different modes. These modes give you varying access to your PC via voice control. The first mode lets you control the whole PC with voice, but seems to get in the way of writing text, as it occasionally brings up menus when you try and say certain phrases. The second allows a small amount of menu functionality and the third is just for annotation to Word or something similar.
Using the headset I was able to train the program to recognise most of my words after about 2 half hour sessions. It still messed up at points and if someone came into the room or a loud noise occurred it would often mess up again, but aside from this it works well.
Then I tried the Philips voice recorder. The quality of this little beauty is amazing. Ok, so it will only record 30 minutes of speech at the best quality but even on lower settings it’s still very clear. Plugging the recorder into the USB slot with the cable provided, I found that I needed to make a recording on to the Hard Drive before the Dragon software would touch it. This is a bit of a pain, but nothing major and it was soon writing out what I had recorded with varying results. After a few goes it got the text about 70% correct, not too bad but not ideal either.
While this set has some impressive ideas, the results can be variable and on a par with Vista’s own voice recognition. If you need the set for recording audio outside of your home (ie in a lecture or meeting) it could be useful, especially if you train the software to recognise your voice for longer. But with Vista’s own software available for free, I’m not sure that £160 is worth paying at the moment.
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Dragon have made a suite of products aimed at business and home users who want to be able to speak to their PC and get the PC to annotate the words.
You may ask why this is necessary when versions of XP and Vista already have functions built in to take voice commands and also dictation software for MS Word and other word processors. The answer is that Dragon is trying to provide something a bit more accurate and with many more options.
The Preferred Mobile pack comes bundled with a headphone/microphone headset and a Philips 128MB dictation device.
Installation is pretty straight forward and, like with many other forms of voice software, the final piece of installation involves a short check on microphone levels and background noise. I had to run through this several times to get the optimum setup as the first time it refused to recognise a lot of the words you need to recite. Still, it may well have been the bundled microphone that caused the issues.
Once up and running, Dragon sits in your toolbox and opens with a bar across the top of the screen where you can click to turn on or off the Microphone and choose the different modes. These modes give you varying access to your PC via voice control. The first mode lets you control the whole PC with voice, but seems to get in the way of writing text, as it occasionally brings up menus when you try and say certain phrases. The second allows a small amount of menu functionality and the third is just for annotation to Word or something similar.
Using the headset I was able to train the program to recognise most of my words after about 2 half hour sessions. It still messed up at points and if someone came into the room or a loud noise occurred it would often mess up again, but aside from this it works well.
Then I tried the Philips voice recorder. The quality of this little beauty is amazing. Ok, so it will only record 30 minutes of speech at the best quality but even on lower settings it’s still very clear. Plugging the recorder into the USB slot with the cable provided, I found that I needed to make a recording on to the Hard Drive before the Dragon software would touch it. This is a bit of a pain, but nothing major and it was soon writing out what I had recorded with varying results. After a few goes it got the text about 70% correct, not too bad but not ideal either.
While this set has some impressive ideas, the results can be variable and on a par with Vista’s own voice recognition. If you need the set for recording audio outside of your home (ie in a lecture or meeting) it could be useful, especially if you train the software to recognise your voice for longer. But with Vista’s own software available for free, I’m not sure that £160 is worth paying at the moment.
You may ask why this is necessary when versions of XP and Vista already have functions built in to take voice commands and also dictation software for MS Word and other word processors. The answer is that Dragon is trying to provide something a bit more accurate and with many more options.
The Preferred Mobile pack comes bundled with a headphone/microphone headset and a Philips 128MB dictation device.
Installation is pretty straight forward and, like with many other forms of voice software, the final piece of installation involves a short check on microphone levels and background noise. I had to run through this several times to get the optimum setup as the first time it refused to recognise a lot of the words you need to recite. Still, it may well have been the bundled microphone that caused the issues.
Once up and running, Dragon sits in your toolbox and opens with a bar across the top of the screen where you can click to turn on or off the Microphone and choose the different modes. These modes give you varying access to your PC via voice control. The first mode lets you control the whole PC with voice, but seems to get in the way of writing text, as it occasionally brings up menus when you try and say certain phrases. The second allows a small amount of menu functionality and the third is just for annotation to Word or something similar.
Using the headset I was able to train the program to recognise most of my words after about 2 half hour sessions. It still messed up at points and if someone came into the room or a loud noise occurred it would often mess up again, but aside from this it works well.
Then I tried the Philips voice recorder. The quality of this little beauty is amazing. Ok, so it will only record 30 minutes of speech at the best quality but even on lower settings it’s still very clear. Plugging the recorder into the USB slot with the cable provided, I found that I needed to make a recording on to the Hard Drive before the Dragon software would touch it. This is a bit of a pain, but nothing major and it was soon writing out what I had recorded with varying results. After a few goes it got the text about 70% correct, not too bad but not ideal either.
While this set has some impressive ideas, the results can be variable and on a par with Vista’s own voice recognition. If you need the set for recording audio outside of your home (ie in a lecture or meeting) it could be useful, especially if you train the software to recognise your voice for longer. But with Vista’s own software available for free, I’m not sure that £160 is worth paying at the moment.