This time around, the big improvement comes in the quality department. If a three-fold speed increase remains out of reach, it's nonetheless true that NaturallySpeaking is almost creepy-good at recognition. As a long-time NaturallySpeaking user, I've seen just how productive speech recognition can be, especially when writing documents of more than a paragraph or two. I managed 77 words per minute with 87 percent accuracy and was routinely thrashed by the demo. Nuance offers a tool to check your own typing speed and compare it to a demonstrator reading out the same passage you're typing.
And if that's the case, get optical character recognition software and a sheet-fed scanner and save yourself even more work. The reality is a bit more prosaic not because NaturallySpeaking doesn't deliver, but because no one talks at 160-or even 120-words per minute for long periods of time unless they're transcribing. In Nuance's own testing of 35,000 people, the company found that the average typing speed was only 35 words per minute with an accuracy of just 58 percent if the new NaturallySpeaking can handle speech at up to 160 words per minute with 99 percent accuracy-well, just think of the time savings!
Nuance, maker of the new Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, claims that you can "triple your productivity immediately!" Most people can speak 120 words per minute but can type less than 40. But for others, it's all about the speed. Why speech recognition? For some, it's a question of overcoming disabilities or of heading off repetitive stress problems from years of typing. Price: $90 Standard ( buy), $145 Preferred ( buy)
System requirements: 1GHz CPU 512MB RAM (1GB for Vista) 1GB hard drive space Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2, or Vista