At my former company I supported a couple of executives who liked to use voice recognition software. They found it more convenient to write emails and documents by voice rather than by conventional mouse and keyboard. So they'd call me periodically to help them set up and use our product of choice--Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I'm not sure how widespread is the use of voice recognition in companies these days. But I thought it'd be worthwhile to look at the current version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking to see if it could play a role within your organization.
Nuance (News - Alert)offers several different editions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, including Standard, Preferred, and Professional. There are even Legal and Medical versions available with terminology unique to those professions. I evaluated the Professional version, which is geared toward businesses who may want to deploy and manage the software for a large number of users.
The purpose of voice recognition software is to move around your computer, run commands, and dictate documents solely by speaking. You can use it to navigate windows, open and close applications, and run key menu and toolbar commands. You can also use it in your browser to surf the Web. But it's most commonly used to dictate text as an alternative to the keyboard and mouse, especially for people who may be disabled in some way or simply can't type or move the mouse.
Both Windows Vista and Windows 7 offer their own built-in speech recognition. You'll find this utility under Accessories | Ease of Access | Windows Speech Recognition. Similar to NaturallySpeaking, Windows Speech Recognition lets you run different commands and dictate text by voice. But NaturallySpeaking does offer several advantages over the Windows speech utility, especially for business users.
To set up NaturallySpeaking after installation you first test your microphone to make sure your voice levels are picked up. I used the microphone built into my computer's webcam, which worked fine. You then set up a user profile to train the software to understand your own voice and speaking pattern. This requires you to dictate one of several passages and typically takes about five minutes per passage. Although you can skip this step, I highly recommend going through the training since it does increase the software's accuracy.
To gauge the actual accuracy of NaturallySpeaking I took both it and Windows Speech Recognition through several test runs. After setting up both programs to understand my voice, I dictated the same passages and uttered the same commands to move around my computer. Though both programs performed well with simple text and phrases, NaturallySpeaking was much more adept and accurate at comprehending more difficult and complex works and phrases.
I also found it easier to correct errors in NaturallySpeaking as the software offers you more options to fix a typo or other glitch. You can choose from a list of suggested words or spell out the correct word. Windows does offer those same options, but NaturallySpeaking proved quicker and more flexible. You can also correct mistakes during dictation or separately. For example, the software at first had trouble understanding my first name 'Lance.' Through the train command I taught NaturallySpeaking how I pronounce my name. After a few seconds of training, it was able to understand my name perfectly in subsequent dictations.
Beyond its accuracy and ease of use, the professional edition of NaturallySpeaking adds a host of features that should be helpful to an enterprise. You can use NaturallySpeaking Pro to dictate directly into common Windows and Microsoft (News - Alert)applications, including Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Internet Explorer. The software also lets you create voice macros to store large chunks of text. Instead of typing your company's address, contact information, or other frequently-used passages, you save them as voice macros and speak a short simple voice command to insert them into a document.
Additionally, you can create more advanced voice shortcuts that perform different actions in an email program such as Outlook. For example, you could create a voice shortcut that says 'Send an email to Lance Whitney.' The shortcut will open Outlook, set up a new email, and put my name in the 'to' field. Those shortcuts also apply to your Web searches. You can utter a phrase like 'search the Web for Windows 7,' and the software opens your default web browser and search engine and runs a search for that phrase. I tried the voice macros and voice shortcut features, and both worked quite effectively.
Finally, NaturallySpeaking Pro provides several network features that make it ideal for a business rolling it out to multiple users. IT admins can deploy the software via the network to install it for multiple people. You can also store and manage each individual's voice profile on a network share or server so that roaming users can tap into their profiles from any PC. Finally, you can set up policies to control what your users can and cannot do with NaturallySpeaking.
In addition to supporting NaturallySpeaking at my former company, I've used the software for many years, periodically moving from one version to the next. As such, I've found that the program has gotten better over time. Certainly, it's not 100 percent accurate, and Nuance doesn't claim that. The software will sometimes makes an obvious error. But more often than not, it's very adept at transcribing fairly long passages quite accurately.
If you support users who need voice recognition software, especially those who can't use a conventional mouse and keyboard, I highly recommend trying out NaturallySpeaking 10. At $900, the Professional version is pricey since it's geared for enterprises. If your needs are smaller you can purchase the Standard edition for $99 or the Preferred flavor for $199. You can learn more about the different editions of NaturallySpeaking and check out the prices for each one at the Nuance NaturallySpeaking purchase page.
Lance Whitney is a journalist, IT consultant, and Web Developer with almost 20 years of experience in the IT world. To read more of Lance's articles, please visit his columnist page
Edited by Kelly McGuire