Earlier this week I received a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Standard ($99.99 USD, affiliate) from a blog contest at thatedeguy.com. Thanks Shane. I don’t remember winning any contests inside blogs before, so this might be a first. The last software I remember winning from any sort of contest was a full retail version of Visual Studio 2003 in a drawing at a local developer event for .NET.

The last experience with the Dragon Naturally Speaking product I had was version 7 the preferred version which I paid $199.99 USD for plus tax at the local Best Buy. It got used for a little while but never part of the regular workflow.

My Tablet PC already has voice recognization on it and although I like the idea behind this type software, I’ve never been able to get it to work in a practical situation very well. My last serious attempt to use speech recognition (SR) was back in May of this year. It seems I get the energy to try and make speech recognition a couple times a year.

I’d love to be able to use SR for blogging, but the too frequent need to correct what the software thinks I’m saying rather than what was actually said has spoiled my enthusiasm in every case to date.

Is Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 any different?
I doubted DNS9 would be better than what’s already installed on my Tablet PC, but was curious to see what was new and at least try it out. I believe someday a speech recognition program will help make me more productive.

Unpacking notes
The included headphone (nice touch) fit very tight, almost painfully so, when you first put it on out of the box. Like breaking in a new baseball glove. I went through the initial training which proceeded relatively smoothly, only having to stop a half dozen times to speak words or sentences over again.

And then was on my way to dictating my first text.

The following text was created with Dragon Naturally speaking:

I’m testing out the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Dictation box. My first sentence didn’t go over too well and good to make multiple changes. Whatever reason and it didn’t understand “I’m” thinking that it was “eine.” That’s been a typical problem with speech recognition programs for me in the past.

A lump of heavy coal for DNS9 for putting an icon in the systray at startup during installation without giving an option to remove. I didn’t try “custom” installation though, so maybe that is where I could stop it from launching in the systray.

By default the gray DragonBar sits atop your screen and controls access to the various functions and allows easily toggling on/off the functions. You can right click and use systray icon mode only.

When you are inside a text box or browser window that supports editing and insertion of text via DNS9 you will see a green indicator.

The “Tools” menu has an accuracy center for training, command browser for commands to do things inside certain programs like Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Word, a dictation pad and DragonPad which is a DNS9-powered text editor that is almost a carbon copy of Wordpad. The “Words” menu allows easily updating with custom words like “blog” as well as viewing recognition history.

There are five different modes to choose from: normal, dictation, command, numbers and spell. Moving in and out of the modes is as easy as saying: “__ mode.” For example, if you want to go into numbers mode you’d say: “numbes mode” which would then spell out numbers like 423 (useful for saying phone numbers, for example).

I plan to try and use it DNS9 throughout the rest of the week and see if I can work it in. It doesn’t seem any better (or worse) than the speech recognition that comes with the tablet thus far, but I need more time to truly compare. If I’m still talking about speech recognition in two weeks you’ll know I’m pretty pleased with DNS9.

Upcoming Hmm reviews
My list of other things to check out is growing and soon I should be kicking out a review for the Rocky Balboa movie, the new “Rehab” CD by Quiet Riot that I finally found in store (been looking for that for awhile) plus some software and web services.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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