Speech recognition software

I thought you needed to know about some software called Dragon naturally speaking preferred version 9. At last week's seminars one of my fellow presenters recommended that I try speech recognition software. I did. I went to Amazon.com and found this Dragon naturally speaking preferred version 9, as recommended, for about one third of the price that I found on Dragon's own web site and I am happy.

I am dictating this message using the software and I have to say it is fantastic. Of course, it needs to be tweaked as it needs to learn my accent and style of delivery but I think it's success rate at recognition is probably in the high 90%s. I have used similar software before but it's nowhere near as good as this. I can even speak fairly quickly, ie almost at normal speaking rate and it still catches up with me: there I just did that.

One reason why I bought this software is because of the repetitive strain injury I suffer from. It's not nice and now I can talk and I don't need to type. Let's see how quickly my fingers recover. Suppose the only thing to worry about is to be sitting in an airport or it coffee shop somewhere and apparently talking to myself.

DW