About Dragon Naturally Speaking

• Text to Speech
• Nuance

27 Jan

A guide to the features and benefits of using Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software.

This is a guest post from the publisher, Nuance.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a great piece of voice recognition software, changes the way we view writing tasks. The average person speaks more than 120 words per minute, but only types about 40 words per minute. Hunt-and-peck typists have an even harder time, turning the very idea of writing a report or letter into a dreaded task. Even with excellent typing skills, most people have a more difficult time writing what they want to say than just saying it.

Using speech to text software like Dragon Naturally Speaking, you never have to type a single word out. You speak, it dictates. It's like having your own dedicated secretary hanging on your every word and faithfully recording them for you - speech recognition at its best.

The package itself is incredibly easy to use. After installing, you'll be prompted to train the program - but it's not required. This is where its speech recognition abilities come into play. By spending about five minutes reading from the screen, the software begins speech recognition that is tailored to the way you talk.

At its core, Dragon Naturally Speaking works like most voice recognition software: it records your words to text. If this were all it did, it wouldn't be able to beat out other speech recognition software that's on the market. Instead, it also allows you to control everything on your computer all by voice commands. You can open, save and close documents or programs, dictate emails, letters and even databases in Excel, and the best thing is that the speech recognition gets smarter as it learns your voice and the way you pronounce your words.

One of the nicest features of this software has got to be the Dragon Bar. This toolbar sits at the top of your screen when you have it activated, takes up very little space and allows you to turn the speech recognition on or off just by giving a command. So, you can sit back on your couch and dictate anything you like. Got a phone call? No problem - tell the software to sleep, and it won't record your conversation. When you're ready to go again, you just tell it to wake up.

Talk about technology making life easier; voice recognition software is all over it.

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