In the usual Florida fashion, it took half a day to get ten minutes of work done. One lineup to get you picture taken, another lineup to get it back. Even when you are the only person in line. I managed to get all the government paperwork done before heading into the shop by late-afternoon. A customer came in with a new idea. You bring your tower in, (not your laptop) and plug in to update all your files. A great idea, so I only charged him ten bucks.Then, having time, I finally went to work with Dragon Naturally Speaking. This is the program I rejected both ten and fifteen years ago. It was either too finicky or hard to deal with. I take back nothing I said before, but the newest version seems to have gone a long ways toward ergonomic usefulness. Certainly, all the problems from the past are solved and I was able to dictate ordinary speech at full speed. (It can be a complicated install, depending on which options you don’t want, like “East Asian English”.) I will need time to put it through the meatgrinder but am already certain I will report back to you with some good information.
Having used Dragon since version one, I can qualify my evaluations. I noticed that punctuation and alignments must still be spoken, so those with excellent grammar and spoken English have a grave advantage with this product. Gone are the long periods of accent training and word-guessing, anything above version 9 seems to know all words. Beware that software always works best on the easy stuff, so do not run out and buy it yet.
What does work well is Dragon dictation. I rattled off a difficult (Churchill) passage and found Dragon got it completely right. It did so effortlessly at over double my best typing speed, and kept it up for over a half hour. There is a lag but if you know your material, it doesn’t matter. If nothing else, it will take the edge off the amount of time required to do basic daily tasks.
One curious feature is that it can scan all your word processed documents and develop a vocabulary unique to your style. This process took nearly an hour on this computer (with almost twelve million words on file—you didn’t think this blog is everything I write, did you?).
I succeeding in tricking the software several times, only to conclude that anybody half-educated should probably avoid Dragon under threat of learning what you really sound like to others. No names mentioned, but if you are already boring, Naturally Speaking isn’t going to help you. This, incidentally, is the most common objection to language programs. People refuse to believe they are so monotonous.
