Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 13 (Discontinued)

To everyone who is considering purchasing Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 13.0, I say you should pick it up. Now, this is not coming from somebody who is an expert at the product, as I've only been using it for a couple of hours now. Nevertheless, this is more or less the same experience you may have showed you pick up a copy for yourself.The version that I picked up is the physical shipment. For a total shipping cost of $10, I received my package in two days. I ordered on a Friday night and received it just after 12 PM on Sunday. THAT'S RIDICULOUS!!! I know some of you may be considering the downloaded version but I highly recommend just picking up the physical shipment. It will also come with a headset which you may find useful.The software installed smoothly and works exactly as advertised. My particular system is a Windows 10 64-bit system. I also have 16 Gigs of RAM. The software has a reputation for consuming a lot of resources and I've generally confirm this. However, my laptop which was built in 2013 is more than enough to handle the software. If you're using a system it's only a couple of years old, you probably won't have any trouble running the software either. I am also using a MikTek Pro Cast SST microphone for Dragon to pick up. (I couldn't get the included headset to work with my particular computer however I believe this is something that is isolated to my computer and may not be an issue for you.)There is a tutorial that will help you understand how to use the software once you install it and started. It's a fairly good tutorial, nevertheless I do recommend following some YouTube videos if you need additional information. I'm just learning to use the system myself but overall I find that it's fairly intuitive.It does get a bit annoying to have to verbalize your punctuation such as the word "Period". This is something that I'll have to get used to, which is a matter of time. I also find that it is very tempting to have Dragon NaturallySpeaking do all of the work for you. I find that I tried to utilize Dragon to do all of the editing and to change all of the words. Knowing when I should do the editing and when I should tell Dragon to edit is something that you will have to figure out on your own. I knew this going into the product and I had decided that the best course of action was to be cooperative with the product and take an interactive approach. So far this does seem to be the best approach.I certainly hope that this review makes sense to you. It was entirely conducted with Dragon naturally speaking, except were a couple of corrections were necessary and I found that it was easiest to make them manually. Overall I'm very pleased with the accuracy – – I happen to have a Midwestern accent which is a little bit drier and may be more accurate for the software itself.I highly recommend Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13.0 Premium. I'm looking forward to using this for all of my blogging and product creation needs. I think you'll find that it's an incredible product as well.Thank you for your time.

I began using speech recognition three years ago because of the volume of research and writing that I do. The reviews for Dragon NaturallySpeaking compared to Windows speech recognition then seemed to concur that WSR was just as good as anything from Nuance. I have always found Windows speech recognition a tad frustrating in the number of errors in recognition results and the poor microphone volume control. The add-on macros are a nice addition to WSR. With the release of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13, I decided to try it to see if it would perform better than the built in Microsoft option.The installation was painless as well as the initial setup. There is no training required to get started, and the accuracy was surprisingly high without this requirement; however, I have since read one of the training documents because of the amount of text that I have to dictate every day, I wanted to ensure greater accuracy.Since purchasing DNS13 on August 11, 2014 I've dictated just over 6,000 words; out of curiosity I did track corrections that had to be made, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking's accuracy came in at 99.2%. My VXi TalkPro UC2 microphone is working very well with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, much better than it was with Windows speech recognition.The product integrates well with Microsoft Word and Outlook, but all of the default hotkeys must be changed otherwise you cannot create formulas in Excel. It is unfortunate that after all of these years that people have requested integration with Microsoft OneNote, the only thing DNS 13 can manage is the ribbon; text cannot be dictated directly into the program.One thing I do miss about Windows speech recognition is the add-on macros tool where I could build routine formatting commands. I use this extensively in Microsoft OneNote; for example, I would dictate a line and then voice a command that would select the entire line, set the font point size, set tags, and then enter a double line feed.If you try to dictate into some web forms, such as Amazon's search field, the Internet Explorer Full Text Control browser add-on does crash Dragon NaturallySpeaking (according to the DNS and Windows event logs), and corrupt all right-click context menus in Windows 7; a reboot is required to clear up the problem. With Firefox, the browser add-on simply does not work.There is a plethora of commands available in DNS 13 to suit whatever level of keyboard or mouse interaction you would rather use your voice to control. I particularly like being able to search the web when something comes to mind, the "search the web" command is great.Overall, for me, the product is better than Windows speech recognition, and I can continue to work around the browser add-on crashing, missing Microsoft OneNote integration, and lack of custom formatting commands as quality recognition is my number one need. For now, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 gets four stars; address the missing OneNote integration and the browser add-on crashing, and I might bump it up to five stars.