Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium Review

Voice control – it’s been something of a science fiction wet dream for as long as people can remember. The idea of simply mentioning what you want done, or what you’d like put down has proven incredibly potent in the imaginations of almost everyone who’s ever touched a computer. Sadly, despite some sterling efforts on behalf of some of the greatest technology companies around today, we’ve still not reached that level of beautiful sophistication.

Enter, then, Dragon Dictation; a company promising complete control over your computer using only your voice, so is it dictation perfection or simply yet another flawed implementation? I guess there’s only one way to find out, read on.

In the box

The packaging for Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a fairly utilitarian affair, and aside some from some reasonably nice Photoshop work it’s a reasonably unexciting box. Ours was a physical copy of NaturallySpeaking premium came with its own dedicated headset with connectors for microphone in and sound out, inside the box you’ll find their headset, a small manual and a disk containing the software; that’s it, really.

The headset is a reasonably high quality affair, the microphone picks up sound rather well (as it should) and it never felt like it was going to break apart when I slipped it onto my head. Audio quality is an entirely different thing, though. You’ll be advised to never listen to anything via the headset other than the occasional ping of Windows system sounds, as anything else just sounds dreadful.

Installation/training/using it

Using the bundled NaturallySpeaking 11.5 software, installation is a fairly painless process; you tick the usual boxes and you’re pretty much away. From there you launch the application and begin your training; after being given a smattering of reading choices you’re asked to give your very best “neutral newsreader” impression and to make as few mistakes as possible. On my Windows 7 32bit installation I had some real problems with crashing software, I had to perform the basic training 4 times before it completed and let me get on with my life as a futuristic jetsetter, casually telling Facebook to post that the person next to me in the coffee shop stank of body odour.

Indeed, if you’re finding the accuracy somewhat lacking, you can go back and do many more reading exercises to improve the accuracy of the software. Alternatively, you can perform certain words it’s having trouble understanding or even input your own words into the dictionary. After doing these things several times, I found accuracy to be pretty good.

There are hundreds of commands, tricks and tips to wrap your head around but with the basics (comma, full stop, question mark, new paragraph) you’ll soon be knocking out slightly uncomfortable documents with reasonable speed. The box promised a 99% accuracy rate, and herein lies the natural fault with dictation software. It is not fool proof. In a thousand word document, there will be 10 misspellings or grammar errors; all of which require time and effort to go back and correct. For all the speed we think we might gain from casually speaking into a microphone, we often require keyboards as a filter for our own thoughts. Punctuation is often not formed in our head, we glance at the page and decide where to place them. As such, the software forces we as dictators to say out loud where we’d like punctuation; an entirely unnatural experience.

Although I gained speed during my time with the software, I never shook the feeling that feeling of watching somebody play a video game badly when you know how to do it perfectly. I simply got tired of seeing the software being so close to what I wanted, but not quite. Typically, this ended up in my pulling the headset off my head and laying my eager hands back on my keyboard for some old fashioned button mashing. The same goes for the general PC controls, there’s a reason why the mouse pointer has reigned supreme for so long; it’s just bloody quick. Most of us now control our computers without really thinking about it, we just point and click. Having to manually think about how many words you want to go back to delete or having to spell out .net because it’s confused ends up in nothing but brain ache and frustration.

Price

The Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium software we reviewed has a RRP of $199.99 in the US, however is currently on sale for $174.99 during the holiday season. In the UK (where we hail from) you will need to shop around online for the best price, but expect to pay upwards of £100 for the real deal.

The future

I’m sure, in every review of dictation software ever written, they’ve described it as “the future” and “full of promise” and that “in a few years we can ditch our mice” but the fact is, this is a future that’s yet to appear. Even the very best of what’s available (including this) are still mildly clunky, unnatural ways of interaction with our digital world. That’s not necessarily their fault, the PC was not designed to be shouted into submission, it was built with the quick efficiency of keyboard shortcuts (and later) the mouse pointer.

Later generations of Windows and OSx might well include a much deeper and intelligent base for voice control to launch itself from, but at the moment it still feels like a genie waiting to be rubbed the right way.

Wrap up

For some people it might well be a perfect solution, the disabled and elderly might well swear to the usefulness of Dragons software, but for the everyday computer user it’s still nothing more than a novelty full of promise. I’m hesitant to give it a bad score, because it genuinely is impressive in many respects; but that’s just not good enough when you’re attempting to leave traditional controls behind. It needs to be faster, more accurate, easier and less tiresome than the current everyday methods, because without being all of those things; it’s really nothing at all.

Rating: (6/10).